Company Profile

Company Overview

For over 20 years, NYC FIRST has inspired and empowered K-12 students from diverse communities across New York City each year to engage with STEM and robotics in meaningful and joyful ways. We create learning experiences that encourage young people to think critically and creatively and to persevere. Each year, our programs are significant drivers of equity and excellence, impacting the lives of thousands of students and teachers. We do this through robotics leagues, district-wide programs, credit-bearing courses, build sessions, workshops, and more, all supported by our STEM Centers, which are at the heart of everything we do. Collectively, these efforts serve as the leading edge of workforce development, helping to develop the next generation of workers, inspiring and guiding students to pursue STEM fields in college and career, thereby helping to bolster New York City’s future economic and civic base.

Our STEM programs are founded on robotics, which is an ideal vehicle for building a young person’s mindset and skillset, presenting students with complex, technical challenges to build and iterate solutions to real-world problems, accomplished in collaborative environments. It provides young people the opportunity to take an idea and transform it into something creative, practical and tangible. And it synthesizes some of the most important STEM-based disciplines and technical skills required by many employers, including computer science, mechanical engineering, mathematics, and physics.

NYC FIRST has a staff of 20, made up of 16 full-time employees and 4 part-time employees, plus 5 AmeriCorps members, and an annual operating budget of approximately $4 million.