As Tech Impact turns 20, the nonprofit continues to shape the tech workforce in Philly, Delaware and Las Vegas

Here’s a bit of trivia: Greater Philadelphia institution Tech Impact got its start with a grant from which Big Tech company?

If you said Microsoft, you know your regional history.

It was 2003. The grant was part of an initiative called the Empower Network, which was created to provide technology capacity building to nonprofits. The funds were matched by the William Penn Foundation.

“That was the roots of it,” Tech Impact CEO Patrick Callihan told Technical.ly. “And then, from there, it grew to the Delaware location and the Las Vegas location and then we added services that were really national in scope. Today we work in pretty much every state in the country, as well as countries overseas.”

As Tech Impact celebrates 20 years — its recent anniversary fundraising event raised $100,000 — there’s a lot more to the organization than when it started, though that focus on helping nonprofits thrive remains, from strategic consulting services to IT security to data management.

About 13 years ago, Tech Impact launched ITWorks, a tuition-free workforce development program for people aged 18 to 26 without a college degree, in Philadelphia, expanding it into Delaware the following year and eventually to Las Vegas, the organization’s third location, which also offers a course called CXWorks for customer experience career training.

“A lot of the organizations that we work with and that support us, namely Barclays, Capital One and Bank of America, all have substantial operations in Southern Nevada,” Callihan said. ”Barclays really helped to facilitate our outgrowth to that market.”

ITWorks has since graduated nearly 900 students across its three program sites, including more than 300 and 350 in Delaware and Philadelphia, respectively.

In the last few years, Tech Impact has expanded beyond its office in the Community Services Building in Wilmington with a learning center on the Riverfront and a space at the FinTech Building at the STAR Campus at the University of Delaware. The latter is for one of Tech Impact’s acquisitions, the Data Innovation Lab.

“We love it,” Callihan said. “It’s positioned, obviously, within the university, so we have access to university talent and opportunity to collaborate within the other building tenants. I think one of the most promising things we’re doing is the use of data, particularly with the state of Delaware projects with the state agencies.”

And the org keeps expanding. In 2022, ITWorks launched a program at the Baylor Women’s Correctional Facility in New Castle. And this past August, Tech Impact merged with Center City, Philadelphia-headquartered B Corp Message Agency, allowing it to offer its clients web and digital services.

Message Agency founder Marcus Iannozzi told Technical.ly then that the orgs have a long history together with many instances of collaboration: “It just became very, very clear how we had a lot in common in our culture, in our values and, we’re just completely aligned in who we serve,” he said.

Moving forward, there will be more ITWorks cohorts added in Philadelphia and Las Vegas, and other developing growth projects that the org hopes to announce soon, per the CEO.

“It’s going very, very well,” Callihan said. “We’re very excited about that continued growth.”