UpTrend, a mobile app focused on employment access for youth of color, won last weekend’s Thriving Cities Innovation Showcase + Hackathon. The hackathon aimed to tackle issues facing the Black community.

UpTrend was a group effort to built on an existing project in development called LegUp. According to cofounder and National Urban Fellow Devon Hawkins-Anderson, LegUp aims to help underprivileged youth ages 16 to 22 gain the access and social capital needed to join the workforce.

“It’s not that they don’t have resources to look for help to get access,” said Thomas Calhoun, group member and cofounder of opportunity network company Nafasi. “The problem is that these resources are very fragmented.”

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