Lantera Labs is the moniker of two separate-yet-symbiotic organizations: Lantera Education and Lantera Consulting. Lantera Education is a non profit tech education org whose biggest donor is (and will always remain) Lantera consulting, a for-profit marketing consulting firm.

We built these organizations because tech-based gentrification is a harsh reality sweeping the United States. Tech is an incredible growth industry, but it comes at a grave social & cultural cost. It makes cities too expensive to live in for the people who make the cities what they are. The wealth gap increases as locals are displaced by high-earning young professionals. Cities change, becoming weird carbon copies of the ones that changed before.

We believe that tech can be, by its very nature, a great equalizer. It’s always growing and changing, no formal college education is needed to master it, and skill-sharing is incredibly common and encouraged. All you need to succeed is a thirst for knowledge and the desire to keep learning.

Tech skills should be made readily & enthusiastically available to all people who desire to learn them – especially those people who live in the communities affected by tech-based growth. We believe in combating the current gatekeeping practices in two main ways: by creating a skilled workforce within a community, and by teaching small business owners and entrepreneurs skills to grow and maintain their businesses.

So… through consulting, we pay ourselves what we need to live comfortably, and funnel the majority of our profits into the non-profit organization, where we offer free introductory tech courses to those people in our community who want, need, and can benefit from them most. An idealist and complex goal, but, hey, it’s 2020 and we gotta change the world ourselves.