The Gamers & Mixers Girls Who Code chapter was founded by Dana Jewel Harris. Dana serves as the Executive Director of The NEXT Steps Youth Entrepreneur Program and creator of the Community On Demand Digital Media Network. Her mission is to teach 6-12th grade girls how to create code and produce music, sound and gaming mixes for their gaming and coding projects.
Dana was always curious about how things worked. As a young girl, she had to learn everything about everything! She had developed a deep love for reading, writing poetry, history, science and math. She began noticing how easy it was for her to take unrelated things and make them systematically work together. She became a visionary. Her STE(A)M skills ultimately gave her the ability to "see" things that had not been created yet but understand how all of the pieces of the "big pictures" fit together.
Dana went on to have a successful career. Over the past 25 years, she has served as an executive assistant, project manager, strategic planner and even a farm manager -- developing business plans, records management and database systems, financial documents, community engagement strategies and special events for the U.S. Army, LaFace Records, The Coca-Cola Company, Burrell Communications Group, CB Richard Ellis, The Environmental Protection Agency and now herself.
Today, she is driven by her passion to teach young girls everything she has learned. Her goal is to help them understand how to use their STE(A)M skills to identify and maximize opportunities they have in front of them right now as future graduates, workforce employees, service women, and/or entrepreneurs. By doing so, Dana believes that she can help girls all over the world increase their value and their ability to produce masterful creations in the 21st Century Marketplace.