Canada Learning Code

The organisation doubled roughly every year from 2011, then went through what Sariffodeen calls the 5x — five times the team and five times the operating budget in the space of about two years, from just under seven full-time staff at the start of 2018 to more than 50 in 13 cities. The model that made it scale was volunteers: one technical volunteer for every four learners in a workshop, because in a first coding lesson a missing semicolon is the difference between learning and quitting. The team's first assumption was that this would never scale — nobody gives up a weekend at that volume. The lesson Sariffodeen took from the community itself was that the framing was wrong: asking for help reads as taking something, and the volunteers were getting something real in return — teaching to learn, networking outside their own industry, doing something they enjoyed. Once the organisation started designing for that mutual value rather than for favours, the same reasoning turned out to apply to its own staff.