Black History Boston: Bridgette Wallace

Creative innovator, advocate, and urban planner

"When you teach a young woman to code, there is nothing she can't do. When you give that young women a home, there's no one she can't be."

Bridgette Wallace is an out-of-the-box thinker who pushes hard for equity and inclusion for those that are undervalued and overlooked. A creative innovator, advocate and urban planner with more than 20 years of expertise creating and managing impactful community development solutions within the public and non- profit sectors. She pairs a broad range of creative leadership experience in public health, public policy and planning, economic development strategy and social entrepreneurship. With a deep understanding of how to better serve black and brown communities by improving avenues to wealth attainment, she set out to create spaces where diversity, equity and inclusion could grow and thrive.

In 2015, she co-founded SkyLab Boston--a community facing organization that was designed to provide educational and hands-on opportunities for residents of Roxbury to learn about and use the latest technologies, strategies and business skills required to launch a new venture or sustain existing ones.

Additionally, with mounting concerns regarding the impact of gentrification on residents of Roxbury particularly millennials of color who are often invisible in plan site, she founded G|Code House. Given the critical linkages between stable housing and success for young people, G|Code offers young women of color a safe co-living, learning, and working community where they will learn cutting-edge technology skills, gain employment experience and connect with our world renown network of mentors, advisers and enterprise partners.

These programs have helped to promote commercial viability in the district, all while creating spaces for talent, potential, and knowledge to advance and thrive. Bridgette is particularly interested in rebuilding the ways Roxbury and other neighborhood economies emerge by delivering specialized, efficient, and innovative plans that fuel long-term economic growth for black, brown and immigrant residents.

Prior to developing the initial plans for SkyLab and G|Code House, Ms. Wallace worked in youth advocacy and the field of public health for a number of years as a program manager for Boston Public Health Commission and the Department of Public Health. She received her Master’s in Urban and Environmental Planning with a concentration in Economic Development from Tufts University. She is the proud mother to her daughter, a graduate of Northeastern’s D’Amore Kim School of Business, who works in tech sector in New York City. She is a member of the Tufts University Urban and Environmental Policy Advisory Board and serves on the Project Review Committee of Plan Nubian Square (formerly Dudley Square).