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Aly Tamboura Highlight
We have so many ways to recycle a plastic bottle, but we think of people as disposable. We have to shift the narrative...people are redeemable.
About Aly
- Got married at a young age, dropped out of college, and decided to pursue my dream of entrepreneurship and start my own geotechnical company.
- While my professional life was excelling, my personal life was headed for disaster—in 2005, I was convicted of assault and spent the next 12 years in state prison.
- Early in my sentence, I got involved with the “lifer” community in prison and was so inspired by their optimism and self-awareness that I began taking classes and self-enrichment workshops.
- I eventually applied and was accepted to a college program through San Quentin State Prison—I attended Patten University and graduated with my associate’s degree.
- I helped relaunch the San Quentin News, an inmate-run newspaper that advocates for criminal justice reform and is distributed to every prison in California.
- Took part in an intense coding program for inmates, which led to me working at the software development workshop within San Quentin—my work caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg.
- I was released from prison, began working as a full-stack software developer, and attended a coding bootcamp—this led to my position as a technical program manager for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
- After a few years with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, I'm continuing my work in criminal justice reform with The Just Trust.
