About Kuumba Code

I spent years in work where the details are not decoration — they are the whole job. I worked in banking in the United States, in both personal and business banking. I worked at Timios, a national title company, making sure a property’s title was clear before a family bought a home — no clouds, no liens, nothing hiding in the record.

That work teaches you something software people often learn too late: a single wrong record costs a real person something real. So when I started building my own platforms, I built the kind that have to be right — secure, database-driven production systems, not marketing sites. Relational databases, authentication and access control, protected APIs, audit logging, and role-based dashboards.

I have also taught third- and fifth-grade mathematics — in Suriname. Standing in front of a room of nine-year-olds and making an idea actually land is its own discipline, one that has very little to do with how well you know the material and everything to do with meeting someone exactly where they are. I learned to teach long before I taught this, and I learned it in the country where I was born.

BenefitsSafe is a compliance and restricted-funds management platform for nonprofits. When an organization hands money directly to someone receiving SSI, Medicaid, or SSDI, that payment can put their eligibility at risk. BenefitsSafe creates a safer path — routing restricted funds toward approved vendors, flagging the benefit programs tied to each beneficiary, and documenting how every dollar is approved, spent, and audited.

What I built into it

• Application architecture across administrators, beneficiaries, grant managers, vendors, and auditors
• Relational database design — grants, beneficiaries, benefit programs, budgets, transactions, vendors, and compliance records
• Authentication, authorization, and role-based dashboards
• Grant workflows — budgets, expenses, and utilization tracking
• Beneficiary records with masking for sensitive identity data
• Protected API routes, validation, and audit logging
• Compliance checks against benefit restrictions
• Reporting dashboards for operations and audit review

With PenSafe Studio I built a developer–client management platform: separate dashboards, project organization, website records, client credentials, tasks, calendars, and messaging. The thread through all of it is the same — I build secure platforms that organize complex operations, control access to sensitive information, and give each person exactly the tools their role requires.

That is the discipline I bring to a classroom. I am not teaching students to admire technology from a distance. I am teaching them to build things that hold up.

On paper and by citizenship, I am American. The United States is where I developed most of my professional, technical, entrepreneurial, and educational work — where I built businesses, worked as a full-stack developer, made creative projects, and founded Kuumba Code.

But becoming American did not erase my Surinamese identity. I carry both, and my life sits at the meeting point of the two.

My life connects

• Suriname and the United States
• My birthplace and my present home
• My father’s revolutionary history and my own institution-building work
• The Caribbean and the African diaspora
• Cultural memory and modern technology
• Family legacy and future opportunity

My family’s movement between Suriname and the United States runs through my father’s history. Watani Stiner — a Black Power revolutionary elder and COINTELPRO survivor — lived in Suriname through years of exile and raised part of his family there. His political history, his exile, and his eventual return to the United States are an inseparable part of my own.

Bringing Kuumba Code to Suriname is not international expansion. It is a return to the country where I was born and where my umbilical cord remains buried — and an opportunity to give something back to it.

Establishing Kuumba Code in Suriname is not an outside organization entering an unfamiliar country. It is a daughter of Suriname returning knowledge, technology, education, mentorship, professional networks, and international opportunity to the land where my life began.

Through Kuumba Code, Surinamese young people gain access to

• Artificial-intelligence education
• Digital skills
• Technology
• Professional mentors
• International speakers
• Entrepreneurship training
• Leadership development
• Career preparation
• Creative opportunities
• Global professional networks

I want young people in Suriname to understand that their geography does not determine the limits of their talent or their future. This work builds a bridge — connecting Surinamese students with educators, attorneys, healthcare leaders, university scholars, technology executives, entrepreneurs, developers, historical educators, and mentors across the United States and the international diaspora.

Through Kuumba Code I am building an educational bridge between Suriname, the United States, Nigeria, and the broader African diaspora. I am not returning to Suriname to teach a temporary class. I am working to establish a lasting educational relationship with Mama Suriname — Mama Sranan.

I want to be clear about one thing, though: Suriname is where I am from, not the boundary of this work. Our first cohort is in Nigeria. We teach in the United States. We go where we are invited, and we are building a network that reaches across the diaspora. Suriname explains why I do this. It was never meant to be the limit of who I do it for.

Being from one place and building in another is exactly what taught me the thing this program runs on: where a child happens to be born should never decide what they are allowed to become. That is true in Paramaribo. It is just as true in Abeokuta, in Oakland, and anywhere else we are invited.