A tech strategist and proud alumnus of Tuskegee University, Arif Gürsel made it his purpose to empower communities of color in metropolitan Seattle through science, technology, entrepreneurship, arts and media (STEAM).
“Bellevue is like the Beverly Hills of Seattle,” said Gürsel. “Being the richest suburb near Microsoft’s headquarters, you can imagine the lack of diversity. I was relocated to Seattle by Microsoft from Tuskegee where I was a student. So going from an HBCU to one of the richest zip codes in the country was a noticeable change in racial makeup, identity and representation.”
In 2015, Gürsel founded a nonprofit, PACE (Pan-African Center for Empowerment), in an effort to inspire strategic alliances among organizations dedicated to development and diversity.
PACE has already begun its work for this year, launching two initiatives: Black Tech Union (BTU) and Koya Academy, formerly Floodgate Academy. BTU is dedicated to increasing the Black presence in technology and entrepreneurship. Its digital platform establishes a global network of information for students, professionals, investors, corporations, nonprofits and media invested in increasing opportunity. Koya Academy is a rigorous training program for coding and computer science, designed to increase the number of Black engineers in the tech-industry employment pipeline.
The success of Gürsel’s nonprofit prompted him to create opportunities for African-Americans in his town, Bellevue, which has little diversity.
The Union, the newest initiative founded by Gürsel, serves as a coworking gathering spot for the local engineering community of African descent to partake in meet-ups, tech talks and engineering and entrepreneurial-focused conferences.
“The Union itself is the physical manifestation of a community gathering place that I personally have been longing for in the Seattle area for quite some time,” said Gürsel. “It’s the kind of place that I also wished existed in cities that if I was traveling, instead of having to work in a ‘we work’ or random coworking space, this was more of a community-focus place where I could connect with other people of African descent easier.”
