Actress Malinda Williams Boosts STEM Initiatives for HBCU Women

Actress Malinda Williams opens up about her natural passion for supporting STEM programs for women at historically black colleges and universities.

Since its launch Arise And Shine Foundation in 2023, the “Soul Food” star helped young women at HBCUs pursue careers in tech through a coding boot camp. The program is modeled after Williams’ personal experiences, who went from actress to tech skilled who learned to construct web sites out of necessity.

“As a successful actress, people didn’t want to hear my story of adversity. They didn’t want to know that I could code or build websites,” she said he said Afro technology.

“They just wanted to know when my next movie was coming out. ‘Yeah. That’s nice, but when’s your next TV show?'”

“So I really had to and still have to push through the imposter syndrome of what I thought people expected of me that I knew I could do. And that’s part of what we’re incorporating into this HBCU coding boot camp is those hard skills of learning to code, but also the soft skills of pushing through adversity and showing up to the world 100% authentically.”

According to Williams, she has all the time been “an engineer at heart,” but it surely was a “spiritual” trip to a bookstore that inspired her to make use of her natural abilities in technology.

“I set off on a further spiritual journey, but I also went to a bookstore and found a lot of spiritual material there. A book called ‘HTML for Dummies’ fell off the shelf,” she recalls.

“I’ve tinkered with technology a little bit. I’m an engineer at heart. My dad’s an engineer, and my mom’s a creative. So I think I have an equal amount of both in me.”

After reading the book, the Wood star taught herself the best way to code at a time when technology wasn’t as advanced because it is now. The challenges she faced helped encourage her to create future coding programs for young women.

“I had learned about four different programming languages ​​at that point, which was about 15 years ago. So there were no modular programs that allowed us to just arrange and drag and drop,” Williams explained.

“You had to know the code. You had to know how to build using these coding languages, and that’s what I learned.”

After teaching herself the best way to code, Williams began constructing web sites for her friends for free and used YouTube to succeed in an audience she wanted to attach with on a brand new level. She saw a shift coming within the content space and desired to help motivate other black women to remain ahead of technology trends.

“I’ve built quite a following on YouTube just by doing hair videos… When you make that change, when you make that transition, when you take that step, everything starts to fall into place,” she shared.

Williams eventually founded Arise And Shine Foundation Inc. together with her sisters Leslie Williams-Dunn and Lisa D. Williams-Sorensen to attach and educate underserved and underrepresented women and girls. The foundation’s coding bootcamp kicked off May 31 at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, teaching students the best way to construct their very own apps and including coding activation, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) training, and Apple’s programming language.

“It exceeded our expectations,” Williams said of this system, which received devices and academic support from Apple as an official partner. “The young ladies came in and were absolutely stunning.”

“We have some arrangements in place for them to celebrate, make sure they feel valued, let them know they are important and that this is an exchange,” she continued.

“We offer resources to you, but you are also a resource to us… It really built trust in a very short period of time during that kickoff weekend, followed by a four-week virtual coding boot camp where all the students learned how to build apps. Some of them knew nothing about technology or coding before they got there.”

Following a successful pilot program, Williams will proceed the coding boot camp in 2025 with plans to expand the initiative to more HBCUs across the country.

“Our goal is to impact every single HBCU,” she said. “Next year, we’re going to be doing a different school. And eventually, I want to do a tour. I want to be at an HBCU near you… I want us to hit the ground running in all these different regions and be present and accessible to women who want to be empowered.”