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 organizing team of 13 high school students from around Canada and the United States 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.
Flagship
On March 1, we hosted the flagship Scrapyard in Austin. We flew in dozens of teenagers from 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. Joining our organizing team that weekend were 70 local high schoolers from Texas and around 30 international students from Switzerland, Singapore, Romania, New Zealand, and many other countries.
Originally planned for Los Angeles, we had to relocate the entire flagship to Austin after the Palisades fire. The event still came together: midnight karaoke, lightning talks, endless energy drinks, and dozens of teenagers sharing their stories through code and conversation.
Satellites
Two weeks later, Scrapyard happened everywhere at once. More than 60 cities across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania ran their own satellite events, each organized by local high school students using the infrastructure and funding we set up. Over a single weekend, more than 4,500 students globally came together to make something, meet new people, and try something new.
Vancouver
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 past 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, on par with the biggest satellite events in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto.