TechWomen Talks: Interview with Sara Hoy — founder of Sara Joy solutions and Chief of people & Ops at Enspire Creative.
Tech Women is a Moldovan initiative that aims to encourage, equip and empower women to explore and pursue a career in IT. As part of this, we are doing a series of podcasts and interviews with women who are making an impact on the IT industry in Moldova.
Elena Putina, our 2021 Tech Women Ambassador, got to talk to Sara Hoy — who has made a significant contribution during her time in Moldova. A longer version of the interview is available as a Podcast, see here: https://anchor.fm/tech-women/episodes/Tech-Women-Talks-with-Sara-Hoy-eqjqtc.
Introducing Sara Hoy
Sara Hoy first came to Moldova in 2014, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. As such, she got involved pretty much from the get go in tech programs, mainly for youth and teenagers. When her two years of service came to an end, she extended her service for one more year working with the Technovation program at the national level and ATIC with assisting with the marketing especially for Tekwill before and after it opened in 2017.
During her time in Moldova, Sara led programs like Technovation, Hour of Code, as well as organized many IT events and campaigns. After that, she then moved to Sweden for a Master’s degree in leadership and sustainability and then joined Enspire Creative as Marketing Director. Here, she grew to become the Chief of People & Ops for their two offices
in Florida and in Chisinau. Sara has also recently started her own consulting business, SaraJoy Solutions.
What brought you to Moldova?
ELENA : So excited to talk to you today, Sara — let’s start from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your time with the Peace Corps — what brought you to Moldova and what drew you to tech programs?
SARA: It helps to start with a bit of a background, so my background was in communications, marketing, and technology.
Right before leaving for Peace Corps Moldova, I was a technology manager for an organization handling servers, computers, phones, fax, copy machine — anything that plugged in I was overseeing & managing it, in addition to social media and thinking about the presence of the organization online but also making sure that computers were operating at their best capacity. I learned a lot in that job, and I think the biggest thing I learned was confidence and to say that I may not know exactly how to fix this thing, but I’m going to figure it out. I did a lot of problem-solving, a lot of troubleshooting with computers and technology and figuring out why certain things weren’t working.
When I was in that job, I began to think about what to do next. I came across some things that were happening with Peace Corps and found some postings mostly in tech — there were some really cool tech things happening in different parts of the world and I thought that would be fun to explore that. But that intimidated me, scared me a little bit — thinking about stepping outside of my comfort zone being here in the US and then changing my life. So, I decided to go through the process, and when you applied to the Peace Corps then you couldn’t really choose where you wanted to go,I just said I’ll go anywhere wherever my skillsets are best to be used. They said how about Moldova? So okay, let’s go to Moldova!
I came in 2014 and worked in Community & Organizational Development as an advisor and worked with different non-profits, worked with a lot of youth, even worked with some kindergarten classes and did some singing in English, so that was a lot of fun. Just a lot of connecting with people — and that was the biggest thing. I was in Balti for two years, so I spent most of my time in the northern part of Moldova in Balti, working with schools, organizations, and getting to know the community there better.
ELENA: So you were in Balti, how did you like that?
SARA: It was fun, it’s the second-largest city — so there’s Chisinau and then Balti. I learned Romanian so it was interesting to be in a city that mostly spoke Russian so while I was learning Romanian, I also picked up some Russian phrases. I had the opportunity to live with a host family and stayed with them for two years — we still talk today. I felt even though it was a larger community, I still felt like I was a part of it.
Technovation & Hour of Code
ELENA: Even when you were in Balti you already started getting involved with tech programs, can you tell us a little bit about that?
SARA: Yeah, it mostly started with Technovation where I became a mentor with a group of girls there — encouraging them to think about how do you use problem-solving when you look at your community and you see there are all of these different things going on, how can you think about it differently and using technology to support that? So that’s a lot of the Technovation competition — building a mobile app, so I learned a lot about coding with a block-based program and thinking about how to create a small business or business plan using entrepreneurial skills to apply that.
So, it started with that, and then I got more involved in local schools. The Hour of Code program was a really great one to see how you could teach any age, even myself, to code. I had a lot of fun working with the Hour of Code program where we would put together a program/workshop of ‘let’s come and let’s learn’ going through these game processes — on thinking through the “if this, then that” type of thing.
We even did a technology club in one of the schools as they wanted to learn some basic web skills and figuring out how to share information with the rest of the school and community by putting that into a website. I also worked with the local university there and assisted in organizing an intro to coding workshops for a week — to the point where I was teaching HTML to a group of young students who were interested.
ELENA: You were teaching HTML!
SARA: Well, it was one intro course — but these were things where I felt that I kinda know this but I’m not an instructor — yet these are things that are really important to get young people to think about these things that they may not have had the opportunity to before — looking at things in a different way.
For someone who, like myself, is going ‘I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together’ — I wanted to give them that confidence to do the same. So, I had worked with a lot of young people in the community to do these things, to practice their English in that sector because that’s really important in the tech field — and wanting to build their confidence to say — “Yeah, I don’t know, but let’s try”.
ELENA: I love that, I think that’s really the biggest objective that we have as Tech Women to say to young people, really young and old to say — “hey, let’s figure it out together”. I think figuring things out is a great skill to have. It’s really great to hear you were doing that in Balti way back in 2014.
Let’s rewind a little bit for those of our readers who are not very familiar with these programs. Can you give a little description of what is Technovation? And then what is Hour of Code?
SARA: So Technovation is a global competition focusing on encouraging young women to get involved in the STEM field. This competition has a program with coursework that sets up these girls to identify a problem in their community — and then they had to come up with a solution by creating a mobile app and business plan and then pitch their mobile app idea in order to work through that problem in their community.
For a lot of these girls the pitch was their first time public speaking in English — many wanted to improve upon their English skills building on the learning they were doing in their classes in school or on their own. They had to think about how to do this with a business plan, how to program a mobile app using these different types of block-based coding programs in having them think through it in English. With Technovation we did some local nation-wide competitions in Moldova where they competed against teams throughout the country in order to move onto the next phase at the global level. It was a lot of fun to see these young girls identify problems they saw at their local level or national level or even global level — thinking about solutions using technology.
Then Hour of Code is a program that has more of a video game approach to it — it has you choose different program options to go through problem-solving and building on each level using basic coding skills. It’s a lot of fun and at the end you get a little certificate that says something like “I completed an Hour of Code” — again, it made you think through things differently.
ELENA: With Technovation, it was targeted toward young girls — while Hour of Code was more general anyone could join at any age, any background. You had a lot of involvement with just the girls’ teams with Technovation, how did you find the enthusiasm? Did you feel the girls were interested?
SARA: That’s a fun question. I think since it was something I was excited about as I was learning a lot of the same things it made it interesting. I would meet these young girls who would say “I can’t do that” and then seeing that confidence shift and for someone in their life to say “Why don’t you try? Let’s try it!” — for some girls they’d say “that’s interesting, I’m curious, I want to learn a little bit more” or even those who were intrigued or curious — “oh, my friends are creating this group to do something, I don’t know what this is about, but let’s try it”…. so there was a little bit of fun in it because they would create these small group of friends, they got to think about things differently than a typical club after school — as it was usually after school hours.
I think for me it was fun to think about, again — let’s see what we can do. I loved seeing those lightbulb moments come on for them when they would figure something out — or in seeing their creativity come out in creating logos, brand design, and those are things that I like and love to see what others can come up with. It was a lot of thinking through the marketing plan — how do we get this information out to people to actually download the app? So, thinking through those processes of even how to market something like that. Even if they don’t end up in the tech sector or doing something with technology, it’s building upon skills that they may be using in other capacities beyond their schooling.
Staying longer in Moldova
ELENA: What made you stay longer? How did you decide to stay in Moldova and keep getting involved and contributing to the tech community?
SARA: I had to think back, what was going on at that time? I think a lot of it was working in a lot of these technology programs and seeing the opportunity and potential for a program like Technovation and others to continue on and thinking about how does this program have a longer-lasting impact in Moldova beyond Peace Corps volunteers being involved in it? Beyond someone staying and really championing this type of initiative?
So, I applied for an extension, because you can’t just say to Peace Corps I’m going to extend my service, you have to apply for an approval to extend your service. So, I was approved for an additional year to extend my service and I partnered with ATIC and continuing with Technovation — and also partnering with some really great women who wanted to also see this program and young girls succeed in the industry in addition to working with ATIC and Tekwill and having multiple projects that I focused on between Technovation and ATIC.
The Dawn of Tekwill
ELENA: Tell us a little bit about your involvement with Tekwill because you were there in literally the construction phase right?
SARA: Yes, I was there when it was still being constructed — to the point where the building still had a bit of shell and you’d walk in and someone would say ‘this is where the stairwell will go, and this is what will be here’ and you’re kinda trying to figure it out and imagine it and then over a few months and weeks it’s coming together.
And then to the point when the office of ATIC moved into Tekwill — when it was still a construction site and you’d go in every day and you’d see something new and the stage being put together, furniture showing up, and literally helping to put things together. Seeing the color — the murals on the walls being painted.
It was really fascinating to see this unfold in real-time and at the same time seeing and sensing — there were still a lot of things happening even before this, there were startup weekends and other spaces that opened before that — you could sense the community and you could see and feel that excitement build and the energy of people coming up with new ideas and questions. Then starting to see that [Tekwill] became a big hub of activity once it opened, it was a really cool thing. And then to see it a couple of years after that, and to see what is happening in this space.
Inspiring Women
ELENA: Before we end, how about you tell us if there is another power woman in IT that you admire here in Moldova that you would recommend as a guest in our next podcast?
SARA: I love seeing young women run with things. So, this is a student that I’ve seen continue to be curious and exploring things. She’s inspired me because I’ve been so impressed with what she has been doing as long as I’ve known her over the last few years — Diana Marusic. I think she would be a great person to talk with as to why she has considered studying it and what has inspired her — I would love to hear her speak on one of these podcasts.
ELENA: Okay, thank you! You’ll need to put us in touch and we can talk to Diana next. We do love this, like you said there is an encouragement in the community. That counts for a lot, I do think that’s important — that we’re all in this together. We’re all a team.
Thank you so much, Sara and keep up the great job!
Keep in touch
A longer version of the interview is available as a Podcast, see here: https://anchor.fm/tech-women/episodes/Tech-Women-Talks-with-Sara-Hoy-eqjqtc.
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Text by Cristina Sotnic & Elena Putina