The Team

Founder, Front-End Engineer, Marquis Cabrera

Marquis is a social entrepreneur with tech skills.  At 16 years-old, he  engineered a computer program that produced IDs used to increase school district security in Middletown, NY.  At 24, he was the youngest to win Massachusetts Innovator of the Year (The Boston Globe) and Massachusetts Youth Nonprofit Professional of The Year (MNN).  Marquis founded Foster Skills, a social enterprise that is supported by AOL, Microsoft, and State Farm.  Earlier in his career, Marquis worked at the White House.  Later, he joined three (then!) early stage startups: Wayfair (NYSE: W), Annie E. Casey Foundation's Case Commons, and Y-Combinator’s Wefunder.  Marquis has been featured in Reuters, NPR, Forbes, Elite Daily, and his TEDx at Columbia University received 20,000+ views.  He blogs for Huffington Post and Stanford Social Innovation Review.  Hillary Clinton nominated Marquis to the Air Force Academy, but he decided to study under former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Roderick Ireland at Northeastern University, where he graduated with high honors and received Huntington 100.  

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Backend, Ruby on Rails Engineer, Lily Barrett

A '12 grad of Kenyon College, I've lived in Ohio's Amish country, spent a year in England, and found my way home to Boston. After rewarding experiences in political communications, urban education, and public media, I've developed a passion for solving meaningful problems through technology. A series of Codecademy, Girl Develop It, and Women's Coding Collective courses deepened that interest. I now aim to make a career out of problem-solving with creative and elegant code. 
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In the past few years, I've also run a creative writing group for locals; coordinated social media for Symbi, a hot NYC-based start-up; and maintained the website for Boston Comedy Chicks, Beantown's only ongoing, all-female comedy night.  Check out my blog at http://lilydbarrett.com/.

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Portfolio Manager, Karina Patterson

Karina is junior at  D'Amore-McKim School of Business student at Northeastern University, where she received a full-tuition merit scholarship.  She is a National Hispanic Merit Scholar and was also selected as a Clinton Global Initiative University attendee in 2015.  She is working towards a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Communication Studies.   Karina has worked for Puma Creative, Flex Events US, UTSA during the US Open, and was a brand ambassador for Aeropostale.  During her time at Northeastern, Karina has held numerous leadership roles: Vice of External Affairs for the Latino Association Student Organization, and President of the Kaliente Dance Group.  She is also a member of the Women in Business and Entrepreneurship Clubs at Northeastern.  

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Founding Engineering Team

David Fuentes, Erica Manoppo, and Marquis Cabrera were the founding engineering team for RateMyFosterHome.Com, which was launched at Code For America's National #CodeAcross.  They collaborated to engineer the first prototype.

Gregory Litt, Engineer, Panorama Education (a Mark Zuckerberg backed company): My favorite project at CodeAcross Boston was also oriented around creating a new data source. The founder of a nonprofit called Foster Skills created Rate My Foster Home, which would enable kids to fill out online surveys about their foster care conditions. I think these examples show that there are still tons of places—ranging from as trivial as a train platform to as important as a foster home—where we can benefit from more data. To see more, click here. 

Clare Zimmerman, Manager, Socrata: "I had the pleasure of attending the CodeAcross event in Boston for Open Data Day, organized by Code for Boston and MassIT. The event took place at MIT’s Media Lab in Cambridge on Saturday, February 21 through Sunday, February 22. We started the day off with some opening remarks from Bill Oates, CIO from Mass IT, and Harlan Weber from Code for Boston. There were three workshops at lunch on the first day: PowerBI by Microsoft, SODA API by Socrata, and MassGIS Resources by MassIT. Some of the awesome projects that came out of the event included MBTA Ninja (Waze for the T), an app to look up 311 requests in the greater Boston area, and a Rate My Foster Home application for children, parents, and social workers in the foster system." Click here to see more. 

Mariko Davidson, Managing Director, Engagement Lab @ Emerson College: "Last year, I led a civic engagement hackathon at the MIT Media Lab co-sponsored by MassIT and Code for Boston [look for me at 0:40 in this video]. Two products in particular came out of this event that I am particularly proud of (and that you may have heard of) are: RateMyFosterHome, an app-based reporting tool for foster youth, parents, and social workers to rate homes, created by Marquis Cabrera, who himself grew up in foster care. This app came from his conversations with leaders and personal experience: “There’s no way to improve foster homes, unless we understand what’s happening in them in real-time." Click here to see more. 

Here's a link to a Code For America write up, which speaks about RateMyFosterHome.Com.