Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Berry.
Joshua, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My story starts in Detroit, Michigan. The formative years of my life were spent witnessing firsthand the hardships of inner-city living. Which directly led to a greater appreciation of the opportunity of location. By the time I turned 10 years old, my parents had packed up my four siblings and me and relocated to Mckinney, TX. It was through the transitional stage of moving across the country that I discovered a love for computers, at the time my utter culture shock made it hard to make friends but with all the time in the world and the imagination of a literal ten-year-old, I started coding.
For many years, I felt like an anomaly being genuinely passionate about something that none of my peers were even thinking about, so I gradually conditioned myself to engage in prototypical conversation topics of early teenagers. Many times, though, I’d instead prefer to talk about Artificial Intelligence, Computer processors, and even software development conferences. By the time I turned 18, I realized the opportunity I had to leverage my passion to empower other students, those that looked like me and those who didn’t.
The years I spent collecting knowledge on computer science had seemingly prepared me to engage in impactful work across the country through the vehicle of my nonprofit, Briidge The Gap. Briidge The Gap was founded to combat inequities in education with thoughtful instruction in STEAM. The first year was largely based around coding educational events with a dabble in the art scene which came in the form of a showcase of 8 DFW artists that I’d befriended leading up to the show.
The experiences of outputting educational moments under the guise of “cool” and “fun” experiences started to make a lot of sense. I knew at this point that Briidge The Gap as an organization could enable opportunities for many students beyond just potential software engineers, so my cofounder, Michael Newhouse, and I dreamed up our four pillars. Cultural Literacy, Digital Literacy, Financial Literacy, and Lingual Literacy.
Our four pillars are designed ultimately in the stride of delivering experiences that exhibit education, expression, and entertainment simultaneously within a given STEAM component. The reason we focus on the four pillars instead of, say, trying to innovate education in various other areas is that we’re focused on building tangible skill sets in the most relevant sectors of society and industry today, bottling them up as inflection point events, and crafting perspectives and interest to send our students and constituency as a whole on pathways to their educational journeys.
While I love the award-winning work that we’re doing at Briidge The Gap, I spent most of the time most days captivated by the work that we are doing at my year-old software company, Fuel The Future. The seeds of the impact that have been sowed throughout the community through the nonprofit showed me clear ways to scale impact through the leveraging of my first passion, software, and a willingness to meet students where they are to empower them.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It most certainly hasn’t been an easy ride; like everything worth having in this life– it’s something you constantly have to work towards. It’s something that I’ve constantly had to prioritize and sacrifice for. Sacrifices like 80 hr work weeks and missing family vacations for events I was throwing were certainly difficult.
In the early days, I started to make gradual advances toward becoming a do-er when I started treating both of my companies like my babies, and in that situation– no one is going to raise my baby but me, kinda thing. So naturally, consistency of diligent work and patience allowed me to watch this work scale drastically.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I think by far and wide I’ve become known as the coding guy, which is flattering yet doesn’t tell the full story. As the CEO of Fuel The Future and the Executive Director of Briidge The Gap, I’m gifted with the opportunity to navigate a workforce of 30 team members across both companies. There was a time when I’d said I specialize in coding, but nowadays my specialty lies in making the steamboat float, which means just lining up my team to execute and win. What I’m most proud of is 10/10, my teams.
Briidge The Gap is about more than multidisciplinary STEAM education at a second glance, While of course we will continue to bring our very utmost vigor when producing experiences (workshops, pop-up shows, etc) that serve to change the perspective of each student we interact with, we pride ourselves on being able to expose our constituency to entirely new opportunities through our pipeline for workforce internships and scholarship opportunities made possible through Briidge’s Network of educational partners, including school districts.
Fuel The Future Platforms was founded to introduce equitable software around education, monetization, and communication. We aim to fuel every other individual’s future with technological solutions around the blockchain and the incoming web3 space. The blockchain has ushered in a new era of financial mobility that has only been made possible through groundbreaking technology. Power to the people, kind of tech. We’re living in a new world where users own their data and they get to run their enterprise. This November, we’re introducing, a Social Enterprise built for web3.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up.
My favorite childhood memory Is a collection of memories actually, that stem from my blog that I ran in my teenage years starting as early as 12 years old where I’d share my love of tech to a dedicated group of viewers that at one point reached thousands monthly. At the time, that was my outlet, that was my way of sharing my love.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.briidgethegap.com and www.ftfplatforms.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/joshberry0
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JBTHD/
- Twitter: twitter.com/joshberry0
- Other: www.Campfuture.xyz
Image Credits
Aaron Walls and Zanee Logan
