Anniecannons Inc

AnnieCannons is a lifetime project.  We have to think big because the problem we address is big, diverse, and deep-seated. We have a grand vision to bring two social movements together to their mutual benefit: the anti-trafficking movement and the movement for diversity in STEM. By connecting these movements, we can serve the booming tech market by tapping an underestimated resource as we reimagine the workplace itself. 

We built AnnieCannons to provide opportuntiies to those who have been most severely marginalized in our communities.

AnnieCannons' model is a response to four core commonalities we see shared by the majority of human trafficking survivors: 

(1) they were made desperate and vulnerable by some circumstance outside of their control, often simply poverty and discrimination,

(2) they acted on a desperation for income, and 

(3) they put trust in someone they felt was trustworthy and was not;

(4) they were exploited for someone else’s gain. 

We first identified these common threads interviewing survivors in a Myanmar shelter three years ago, when we decided learning to code and earning that income could have helped prevent their being trafficked. Our students today, living in and overwhelmingly originating from the Bay Area, actually share those common misfortunes.

To see our students succeed, AnnieCannons must overcome systemic barriers to the advancement of women and persons of color in technology fields. We know that the root of trafficking itself – as well as the diversions in the flow of money meant to fight trafficking toward "rescue" efforts– results from the same kinds of discrimination and bias (often unintentional) found in many modern workplaces. And, as it happens, that is exactly the same set of issues thwarting women in STEM.

Groups that are systematically discriminated against are often assumed to be incapable without being given any real chance to prove themselves smart and capable. But what if Albert Einstein had been born in 1879 as an impoverished black woman instead of an lower-class white man? We fear we have missed many great innovations by exploring large segments of talented individuals.

We think survivors of human trafficking have been denied more opportunities, have been ignored, more than pretty much anyone else. So, we started there. At AnnieCannons, we empower human beings who are capable and driven to participate at every level in the development of software technology, from the testing to the app development itself. We have decided to invest in the probability of great minds among those systematically denied opportunities - including operating a business that generates revenue based on how much they earn for themselves. 

We train survivors in what we believe to be the most lucrative skill you can learn without so much as a GED, and we guide them to begin earning money – earning economic power - from those skills almost immediately. 

In the process, our students are designing software that serves their communities and fights the trafficking they know from their experiences, using the skills they have learned about how to create software.  

Now, we hope to secure the resources to offer our training to more students until their collective productivity as working, contract-based developers can sustain and grow our training operations on its own. 

Our students can fight the discrimination and poverty and systemic underestimation that drives trafficking around the world by becoming paradigms of achievement.  Exemplars for others. Living proof of their own capability.

We think that is what will, over generations, remove the scourge of human trafficking from this Earth.  And we think that is how companies undertake initiatives to improve their own supply chains, to participate in the anti-trafficking movement meaningfully (and in the diversity in STEM movement simultaneously).

We believe our supporters will gain both tangible and intangible benefits for their own enterprises by supporting our programs.  We hope you'll support us - For just a quarter of the cost of a coding bootcamp, we can give each student even more training and much more support!  Your $5000 donation covers our entire cost for one student in an upcoming cohort.