What the District’s Summer Strong investment built in Anacostia this summer.

This summer, eleven OpenWise scholars walked into a room at Bard High School Early College DC and, six weeks later, walked out having built machines that run.

Three weeks of game development. Three weeks of robotics. Two instructors and a teaching assistant in the room — not one. A longer day than we have ever run.

That design was not an aspiration. It was a budget decision, and it was made possible by the District. In April, Mayor Bowser and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education announced more than $2 million in Summer Strong DC grants to 30 community organizations serving more than 1,300 young people, with the majority of participants served in Wards 5, 6, 7, and 8. OpenWise Learning received $50,000 — more than double our previous award, and the largest single grant in our ten-year history.

Here is what that money changed.

For two years running, roughly a third of the scholars who started our summer program finished it. We said so publicly, because a number you hide is a number you never fix. The honest diagnosis was not the students. It was the model: one instructor, however deep his knowledge, cannot simultaneously teach compiled languages and hold the attention of a room of middle schoolers in an under-resourced environment. Families told us this. Alumni told us this. The District’s own summer 2025 site visit — which rated the program “Performing,” the top band of its scale — told us this too, in the one domain where we did not earn full marks.

So we rebuilt it. More staff in the room. Two cohorts instead of one. Six weeks instead of five. Building things you can hold instead of watching video.

Ten scholars presented working machines. An eleventh finished the six weeks but went home sick before presentations.

That is not a rounding error against six completions last year. That is the program the District’s investment made possible, and it is the reason we are writing this in September rather than waiting for a year-end appeal.

Ten years, one conviction

OpenWise turns ten this year. Across DC and Nairobi we have served more than 200 students — Anacostia to Nairobi to Barbados, a diaspora-led model that we did not copy from anyone and that nobody can copy from us.

The conviction has not moved since 2016: genius exists everywhere. What is lacking is opportunity. Every year we get to run this program is another year of evidence that the first half of that sentence is simply, observably true.

Opportunity is something people supply

If this is the kind of work you want more of in Washington, there are three ways in:

• Partner with us — organizations, schools, and funders
• Mentor a scholar — if you work in tech, this is the highest-leverage hour you can give us
• Volunteer — classroom support, field trips, demo days