Why I'm building this.
I'm Tarik Alem, founder of New Generation Academy. I grew up in South King County and I still live in Tukwila. Everything below actually happened to me: the volunteering before I had a career, the program that got me into tech, twelve years of database and AI work since, and the reason I'm doing this now instead of waiting until I have more time or more money.
Service before any of this was a career
Before Year Up, before tech, I volunteered with City Year for a year: environmental renovation and social-awareness work in Seattle neighborhoods. I wasn't thinking about where it would lead. I just did it because it needed doing.
Eight stops. One thread running through all of them.
City Year, before any of this was a career
Before Year Up, before tech, I volunteered with City Year for a year: environmental renovation and social-awareness work in Seattle neighborhoods, the kind of thing Year Up itself later formalized into a real on-ramp. I wasn't thinking about where it would lead. I just did it because it needed doing.
Instructor Assistant and summer camp counselor
The community-service thread wasn't a single year, it ran the whole time. I worked as an Instructor Assistant through Seattle Public Schools, and for six or seven summers I was a camp counselor with Seattle Parks and Recreation, mentoring kids during their most formative years. Add the ten-plus years refereeing elementary through high school sports, and youth work is not a new interest I picked up for this nonprofit, it's the actual throughline.
Year Up, Bellevue College
A technical support certificate and 36 college credits, the on-ramp Year Up exists to build: closing the opportunity divide for capable kids with the ability but not the direction. I started in the front-end track. Not where I ended up, but the first proof I could build things.
Expeditors International, software tester then MongoDB DBA
Year Up placed me at Expeditors as a software tester, working across freight management systems. I picked up MongoDB while I was there, got hired on full time, and about a year and a half in, moved from testing into the MongoDB DBA side: managing databases behind 8TB of financial data and 5TB and 2TB of freight operations.
Mentoring Year Up students while I was still climbing
I was still early in my own career when I started mentoring Year Up students and alumni myself, in classrooms and in workforce settings, for about three years.
Allstate Insurance, Senior Consultant, MongoDB DBA
Led MongoDB infrastructure for P&C insurance workloads: replica set administration, performance tuning, schema design for claims and policy data, and production Atlas migrations.
Progressive Insurance, Senior AI & Graph Platform Engineer
Twelve years of database work led here: MongoDB and Neo4j at Fortune 50 scale, production agentic AI systems, and the company's first enterprise MCP gateway. I manage two engineering interns through Progressive's ITAHIP program right now, evaluating them for full-time conversion. The same door someone once held open for me.
PNBOA basketball referee, South King County
Most weeks I'm reffing games across the same schools and neighborhoods this program is built for. I was already showing up there before Academy existed.
New Generation Academy
Free tech and AI fundamentals for underserved youth in South King County, taught right now. Seventeen years after City Year and ten years after Year Up, it's the same thing I've been doing, just with a name on it now.
Why this is personal.
I grew up in South King County, and I still live here, in Tukwila. I'm African American and first-generation Eritrean American, and the neighborhoods this program is built for are the ones I'm from, not ones I studied from a distance.
The opportunity divide is real, and up close it looks like kids with the ability but not the direction, and often nobody nearby who has actually made the jump from the block to a Fortune 50 building. I have. I'm already in the gym reffing, already living in the neighborhood, and now I want to be in the classroom too.
I built New Generation Academy around what actually got me here, for kids who remind me of who I used to be.
The work behind the teaching.
I still work full-time as a database and AI engineer at a Fortune 50 company. Everything in this program is something I actually do for a living, not something I read about and am now teaching secondhand.
Credentials
If this matters to you, let's talk.
If you're a school, a funder, or someone who has done this before and can tell me what I'm missing, I want to hear from you.
newgenerationacademyseattle@gmail.com ›