Blacks In Technology’s Southwest Virginia chapter celebrates its first year

With one year in the books, Southwest Virginia’s Blacks In Technology chapter appears to be moving fast.

The organization, which started with a handful of members, now is closing in on 80, its officers say. That growth led the international Blacks In Technology organization to recognize the Southwest Virginia group as the nation’s fastest-growing chapter. 

The local chapter, called BIT SWVA, will celebrate its achievements during a Saturday event at the Roanoke City Market Building’s Charter Hall. Games, food and drink, and entertainment including spoken word and dancing are on the agenda. 

It’s been a big first year, but deliberation underpinned what looked from the outside like quick growth, said Douglas Pitzer, the chapter’s vice president.

“I believe the reason that we’ve been able to grow so efficiently is because we haven’t rushed anything,” Pitzer said. “And we’ve always made sure that we have the fundamentals strong and structured before we start to build anything out in terms of scaling.”

Not that the group moves too slowly. It put on 10 events during its first year and has more than 50 planned for the coming year, said Harvey Brookins, one of the chapter’s founding members. Among them are such regular events as an ESports event for youth at Fishburn Mansion; Final Fridays, a networking event that includes games; and computer learning sessions for folks looking to get started with technology.

BIT SWVA in March hosted a Women in Tech event that featured speakers at various stages of professional experience. An April 30 event called B.Y.T.E.S. will focus on growing personal brands on such professional networking sites at LinkedIn, said chapter president Angela Dickerson.

The March 13 event, called Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress, featured Virginia Tech’s Bevlee Watford — recently retired as the College of Engineering’s associate dean for equity and engagement and executive director of the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity — and Zenith Barrett, Goodwill Industries’ vice president of business and community engagement. The feedback was illuminating and showed that BIT is serving its purpose, Dickerson said.

“We had some women who just were like, ‘I just could never imagine being in a room like this with these powerful and amazing women, and now I’m aligning to them and I feel encouraged to go out and do more than I thought I could do before,’” said Dickerson, a chapter co-founder. “You want to hear those kinds of things from an event.”

The larger BIT organizational slogan is “Stomping the Divide.” The divide is not between races or cultures, Brookins said. It is among Black people themselves, particularly between those who are involved in tech and those who are not, he said.

“We will have people at our events that have a GED, and people who have PhDs,” Brookins said. “We’ll have some international students that are coming over from Nigeria and different places in Africa. … Virginia Tech students meeting with somebody who lives in Roanoke but emigrated here from Jamaica.”

The regional chapter, aligned with the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council, began to take shape following the COVID-19 pandemic and the civic unrest that spilled out across the country after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, chapter officers said. 

Something else inspired it, too: an opinion piece in The Roanoke Times, which Michael Friedlander, the executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, wrote in June 2020, responding to some recent racist events in Roanoke, Brookins said.

Friedlander’s piece led to conversation among RBTC board members, said Brookins, an officer and executive at National Bank of Blacksburg and a board member for RBTC’s umbrella organization, Verge. 

[Disclosure: Verge is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]

“How can we do better as a council? And we found out that in the overall tech industry, despite Blacks being 12% of the population, Blacks represent 3% of the tech fields or businesses across the board,” Brookins said.

The jobs and wealth-building over the next decade and more in the Roanoke-Blacksburg region will include technology — and they already do, with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute going strong and a lab building taking shape near it, on South Jefferson Street, he said.

Brookins developed a committee that would call on Dickerson, a manager at the Blacksburg-based blockchain company Bullish, to get involved. Dickerson found the Blacks In Technology international organization and reached out. They launched the group on April 14, 2023, with Pitzer — who works for Feeding Southwest Virginia and has his own tech-centric tutoring business, Strokes of Genius — also on board.

Having established the chapter, its officers’ next goal is sustainability, Pitzer said. 

“We have created some amazing initiatives as well as some amazing workshops that have allowed some people to get certifications as well as some people to get actual careers already,” he said. “Our goal right now is to turn that systematic, so no matter who is the president, vice president, it doesn’t really matter. … That system behind us that’s making it successful is able to continuously function.”

But for now, it’s time to celebrate, and everyone is invited, Dickerson said.

“I always tell people, because they’re never sure if they should come to our events, that membership in Blacks In Technology is for people who identify as Black or African American, but our events are open to the community, because we know we don’t live in a bubble,” Dickerson said.

“The membership is that way because there’s a lot of free and reduced resources that companies donate in the hopes of reaching that particular underserved community. But our events are open to our greater community.”