Alexandra Clare and Marcello Bonatto founded Re:Coded in 2017 with a pilot cohort of 30 students in Erbil, Iraq, adapting The Flatiron School's web development curriculum for people the humanitarian aid system was set up to process as case numbers, not train as engineers. Nine years later, Re:Coded has trained more than 25,000 people across 145 countries, built a learning community of over 100,000, and reports an 87 percent job placement rate within six months of finishing its programs. Clare's own framing of the original problem, from the first cohort, still describes the model: "There are very limited opportunities available to refugees locally. Which is why we are teaching skills that transcend location."
The current program runs on that same logic at a much larger scale. Re:Coded offers free, self-paced online courses in UX/UI design, software development, workplace skills, job search, and digital freelancing, alongside a selective four-month Resilient Futures Fellowship where participants build real projects and develop leadership skills inside a global cohort. Graduates have gone on to roles at Virgin, Adidas, Starbucks, Atlassian, and more than a dozen other named employers, according to Re:Coded's own published outcomes. None of that required treating displacement as a disadvantage to manage around. It required building a pipeline good enough that employers would hire from it on the strength of the training alone.
What the program is actually building
Teaching someone to code from wherever they happen to be displaced to is not the same claim as building a curriculum specific enough that Atlassian and Adidas hire directly off it. Re:Coded's tracks are built around that second, harder claim, ending in a portfolio and an interview pipeline rather than a certificate of completion. The Resilient Futures Fellowship adds a four-month runway of real project work and leadership development on top of the open courses, the same way Empowr Co's junior-year internship, the organization profiled in the first piece in this series, turns curriculum into a credential employers actually recognize.
The structure also does something quieter: it treats displacement as a logistics problem to design around, not an identity to center. Courses are free and self-paced because a fellow's ability to attend class on a fixed schedule can't be assumed. Skills are taught to "transcend location," in Clare's own words, because the whole premise of refugee status is that location is exactly what a person can't rely on. That is a program built by people who thought through the actual constraints of the population it serves, rather than one that retrofitted a general bootcamp with a mission statement.
Why this is the version worth pointing to
Nine years in, Re:Coded is also proof this model survives past the pilot stage most tech-for-good programs never reach. A 30-student cohort in Erbil in 2017 becoming a 145-country, 100,000-person community by 2026 is the kind of growth curve that usually shows up in venture-backed companies optimizing for engagement, not in nonprofit skills programs optimizing for placement. Getting there while holding an 87 percent placement rate, rather than trading outcome quality for scale, is the part worth naming directly.
This is the same standard Shery builds to on the Aparato side of our own work, and the same one Empowr Co met in the piece before this one: a system worth building leaves the person who uses it more capable when it's done, and it should hold up whether it serves thirty people or a hundred thousand. Re:Coded is doing that for displaced people specifically, a population most technology built today is designed to track, screen, or exclude rather than train. It's the second organization in this series, and so far, the clearest evidence that the first one wasn't a fluke.
This is the same standard behind every system Shery builds through Aparato. See what that actually looks like →