About Us
BootUp is dedicated to empowering elementary teachers and students through computer science and creating equitable computer science programs in underrepresented and underserved communities. Since 2015, BootUp has worked with over 650 elementary schools impacting over 230,000 students, providing in-person professional development, coaching, and on-site support that prepare teachers to facilitate coding projects in Scratch and ScratchJr. Students are inspired through creative and interactive lessons that allow them to explore their personal interests with code.

Our Mission
We prepare and empower teachers to implement elementary coding and computer science programs nationwide in order to reach ALL students, creating equitable access to 21st-century skills.

Our Vision
Ensuring ALL elementary students learn to code by empowering their teachers
Our Values

Integrity
We strongly value and prioritize being honest and having strong principles for doing what we do. Integrity is consistently one of the first values we want to be known for as an organization and as individuals.

Equitable/Egalitarian
BootUp's successes over the years are a result of our ability to collaborate on a team with diverse backgrounds, expertise, opinions, perspectives and experiences.

Innovative
We are constantly striving for innovative and creative solutions that assist with our overall mission and vision. This includes everything from our approach to professional learning to highly engaging interest-driven, project-based curricula.

Proven
Part of our success is because our approach is not only based on educational research, but from extensive feedback from a variety of sources. We actively seek out feedback that continues to refine what we do.

Flexible and Relevant
We believe that computer science education is not only growing at a rapid pace, but is iteratively changing over time. We try to stay flexible and relevant by keeping up-to-date on the latest research and practices in computer science education.

Inclusive and Welcoming Culture
All of us at BootUp genuinely enjoy not only the work that we do, but who we work with. We come from varied backgrounds and cultures that are shared and embraced among the team.

Engaging and fun!
Not only do we try and make the professional development and curriculum engaging and fun, but our work environment and collaborations, as well.

Simple and Iterative
We don't like to make things overly complicated. By keeping things simple, we are able to focus on fine-tuning our approach over time in order to continuously improve what we do. This iterative process is similar to the Japanese concept of "kaizen ( 改善)," which encourages team members to think through and share opportunities for improvement.
Our Team

Savita Raj
Chief Executive Officer

Abby Funabiki, MPA
Associate Executive Director

Suzanne B. Carlson, M. Ed.
District Coding Accelerator

Brenda Bass
PD Manager

McKay Perkins, MS
Senior PD Facilitator

Heather Cunningham, EdD
Senior PD Facilitator

Melody Hagaman
Senior PD Facilitator

Ashley Waring
Senior PD Facilitator

Becky Hansen
PD Facilitator

Tenisha Harrington
PD Facilitator

Allison Knight
PD Facilitator

Natalie Varkey
PD Facilitator
Emilie Martinez
Web Developer

Stacie Mason, PhD
Research and Evaluation
Our Board of Directors

Ari Ioannides
Founder, and Board Treasurer

Todd Ullah, Ed.D
Board Chair and Vice President, National Education Foundation

Lien Diaz
Board Vice Chair and Director of Educational Innovation and Leadership, Constellations Center for Equity in Computing at Georgia Tech

David Evans
Board Secretary and Chief Relationship & Development Officer, Q Financial Design Workshops, LLC

Allison Miller
Senior Improvement Coach, Ed Direction