Ladies Learning Code

Director, Girls Learning Code + Kids Learning Code

Laura grew up all over Southwestern Ontario, moving around her whole life. Always “the new girl” Laura began to understand, pretty early on, the importance of relationships and “staying connected”. With an educational and professional background in Human Resources, Laura made the shift to the world of consulting 4 years ago and has not looked back. The link between technology and human relationships fascinates her. This has ignited a personal passion for exploring and helping others to learn, women in particular, how to leverage and evolve the technology available to us in our world today and even tomorrow. In her spare time, Laura is exploring what technology has to offer and how it can help her do her job better, much like many of Ladies Learning Code’s beginner-level students. She has recognized these untapped resources at her fingertips and is energized to help others break through into this world of opportunity!

Chapter Lead, Girls Learning Code + Kids Learning Code

With a background in fine art, Ashley also enjoys painting, sculpting and drawing when she isn’t coding. She loves collaborating on creative projects with people of different specializations and is currently aiding in the launch of Toronto’s first mobile Children’s Museum, inspired by the late great Marshall McLuhan. She has worked and interned for companies like TIFF and CBC and is thrilled at the opportunity to add Girls Learning Code to that list. As a lady learning code herself, she is excited at the thought of passing on that passion to younger generations. Girls Learning Code is an awesome organization! Seeing the girls learn skills and confidence in the realm of tech each week is really inspiring. We're really motivating girls to be the best that they can be, all while having fun.

Chapter Lead, Girls Learning Code + Kids Learning Code

Kathryn grew up in a small town just north of Toronto and found passion for design and code at the young age of twelve. Today, since recently graduating from the new media program at Ryerson University, she is an aspiring independent new media artist with an eager attitude towards learning and the development of technology. Her interests lie in robotics, interactive digital installations, as well as various forms of cultural sound art. Kathryn also works as a user experience web developer amongst a number of diverse startups at the Ryerson Digital Media Zone, and is excited to pass on her enthusiasm for the tech industry to a younger generation. She believes in creativity, and a do-it-yourself approach while learning, and is excited to be working with Girls Learning Code to produce fun and personalized environments to inspire girls to be resourceful makers.

Founder + Sponsorship & Partnerships

Heather Payne is the founder of Ladies Learning Code,  a Toronto-based not-for-profit startup that runs wildly popular  workshops for women (and men) who want to learn computer programming and  other technical skills in a social and collaborative way. Recently, she founded HackerYou as  a way to bring more learning experiences around technology, startups  and entrepreneurship to Toronto. She’s also working on a project for the  Mozilla Foundation: her job is to build a community of people and  organizations in Toronto who care about raising youth as creators – not  just consumers – of technology and the web. She was an early investor in ShopLocket, and in a former life, Heather helped startups like Pinpoint Social and Shopcastr to acquire their first users. You can reach her at heather [at] ladieslearningcode.com.

Operations, Ladies Learning Code

Melissa was born and raised in London, Ontario. When her family purchased their first computer, she began spending her evenings and summers coding a Harry Potter fan site (by trial and error). She then entered high school, where computer science was not promoted or encouraged, and lost touch with coding. Melissa went on to graduate from the Richard Ivey School of Business and since her first startup in university, she's realized what an advantage a technical skill set would bring. Since then, she’s always dreamed of a group for women that makes coding and tech sexy and really makes it accessible to complete beginners. She thinks the buzz around the #ladieslearningcode is case in point that Toronto (and the world) needs groups like this and she couldn’t be more excited to be part of it. Ladies Learning Code is more than a resource to her, it’s a community.

Content, Ladies Learning Code

Breanna was born and raised in a small village in British Columbia, and knew the big city of Toronto was calling her name when she started her own online business at the young age of 10. Breanna attended The University of Toronto, Computer Science and finished her degree in Information Technology Management at Ryerson University. In her spare time, you will almost always find Breanna "Googling" anything and everything - usually from her iPhone, reading the latest technology magazines and blogs, catching a concert, Facebooking, blogging and tweeting galore! As a woman that works in IT, she wants to help encourage other women to get involved and help make tech less intimidating and scary.