Serving the underserved: Tech Goes Home CEO Dahlia Bousaid Cox on her journey

Dahlia Bousaid Cox’s career has been about supporting the underserved—and her role as CEO of nonprofit Tech Goes Home continues that mission.

In the 2000s, Bousaid Cox worked at the Railroad Street Youth Project in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a nonprofit organization that worked with underserved young people in the community to provide support and steer them away from drugs and criminal activity. It was a collaborative approach, she told IT Brew.

“I felt like the Railroad Street could really step in and help to work hand-in-hand with young people to provide solutions for what they were facing,” Bousaid Cox said.

Experience. She left as executive director in July 2007, joining the Massachusetts Department of Public Health the following January. After four years with the department, during which she earned a Masters in Education from Lesley University, Bousaid Cox joined the United Way as director of community impact; she stayed there for a decade until moving to Tech Goes Home in 2022.

“Covid shone a light on the need for access to…digital skills, and Tech Goes Home was at a place where they were excited and ready to bring on their first part of development out of fundraising,” Bousaid told IT Brew. “And I was at a place in my career where I was ready to really take on that challenge.”

Connections. Bousaid Cox sees her work with Tech Goes Home as an evolution in not only her career but her personal life. Growing up in the 1990s, she and her mother only had one computer that her mother had to use for work. Bousaid Cox wasn’t allowed to use it because if it broke, “that would mean her livelihood, hence our livelihood, our rent, our food, and all of those budgets.”

Although tech has become more ubiquitous, Tech Goes Home aims to close the digital divide for underprivileged communities in Massachusetts. The organization works with stakeholders in the public and private sectors to further that goal and claims 81% of program graduates go on to better jobs or further degrees.

“That’s my throughline,” Bousaid Cox said. “Each of these organizations that I’ve worked for and with, it’s about providing a sense of community support so that folks can use and be confident in the use of the opportunity that's in front of them, and find their own agency in building their future.”