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Toronto Raptors Hackathon

Social Impact Initiative
The Toronto Raptors supporting youth in their choice to pursue STEM education
Our Inaugural Raptors Hack-a-thon delivered a day’s worth of interactive STEM programming for youth aged 15-18 from racialized and underrepresented communities.

1

Objective
By engaging students with modules on data analytics, design thinking, and presentation skills and wrapping them in a layer of sports technology, we inspired the new generation of Raptors fans to consider careers in STEM.

2

Opportunity
Attendees, of which 80% identified as BIPOC and 42% as female, experienced hands-on learning by working through innovation challenges that focused on fan engagement and team performance.

3

Outcome
While collaborating in groups, youth developed concepts they pitched to judges - ranging from the Raptors Front Office and Business Operations teams, ultimately competing for prizes for the best ideas.

"This was an amazing event and it made me want to participate in more hackathons just like this. I hadn’t ever thought of tech jobs in sports before, so this event opened so many career paths for me.” — PArticipant

about

This inaugural event was presented by SportsX, and made possible through collaboration amongst the Raptors Front Office Inclusion team, the Digital Labs Strategy & Analytics team, MLSE Launchpad (our youth community centre), our innovation partner (AWS), and BridgeTO Youth, a community organization that worked with the Raptors to support outreach and registration of students and collaborate on the development of programming. They are a not-for-profit organization  driven to help youth in under-served communities achieve success beyond high school. Bridge TO Youth provide free tutoring, mental health workshops, outreach support, mentorship, and exclusive career-related events, to help bridge the gap to success for our youth to reach their full potential.

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