Over four months, I worked as a core organizer on Hack Club’s Scrapyard: a student-led hackathon series with a C$200,000 budget, one flagship event in Austin, Texas, and more than 60 satellite events around the world. Our team built the infrastructure that made this possible—funding, sponsorship outreach, branding systems, documentation, and banking support through Hack Club Bank—so that high school students anywhere could run their own event.

On March 1, we hosted the flagship Scrapyard in Austin. We flew in dozens of teenagers around the world to build unconventional projects—trash cans that talk back, games that reward you for throwing your phone, and other experiments that didn’t need to be polished to be meaningful. Two weeks later, Scrapyard happened everywhere at once. More than 60 cities across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania ran their own events, bringing over 4,500 teenagers together.

I also led Scrapyard Vancouver through the British Columbia Youth Developer Collective, an organization of over 350 high school developers across BC that I had spent the last two years building from the ground up. We hosted 85 students from across the province, ran workshops, managed local sponsorships, and ended up organizing the largest youth hackathon in British Columbia to date.