Hacking the club
Welcome to Hack Club!
Hack Club started as a community of clubs in schools called “Hack Clubs.” Hack Clubs host weekly meetings to teach or explore something new - teaching programming concepts, or making a new website, or trying that new fangled framework. Over time, Hack Club expanded from just clubs and into other programs - like YSWS (I explain YSWS in the next section) - but clubs continue to exist.
Clubs
Anyone can create a club! There are over 1000 Hack Club clubs across the United States.
To start your own club, fill out the form here to get a care package of stickers. Hack Club also offers resources to make your club successful - from ready-to-use workshops to advice from other club leaders and a supportive community.
- Workshops - 100+ workshop lessons to choose from. Simple and digestable
- Jams - Collaborative coding workshops where sparks ignite, fears dissolve, and inventions come to life
- Letter - Letters and write-ups from leaders about their success, how they marketed their club, and the struggles they hit running their own Hack Club club
- #leaders - A channel in Slack for club leaders to ask other club leaders for help or ideas
- Club-only YSWS programs to nab pizza or Raspberry Pi’s for club members
- A monthly newsletter to inform club leaders of what YSWS programs are currently going on
- :HCB to manage finances when fundraising and such
HQ
Hack Club’s HQ used to be in Shelburne, Vermont at 15 Falls Rd, 05482, next to a country store that sold hot fudge, but Hack Club grew out of the small house. So they rented a bigger house at 212 Battery St, Burlington, Vermont. Zach wrote a blog post on Slacker News about their move and included a 3D scan of the old HQ.
You can talk to the people that run Hack Club through the #hq channel in the Slack, and to the moderators through the #fire-dept channel. If you’re looking to contribute to the various projects in Hack Club, #hq-engineering is a good place to ask.
”Do I get kicked out when I turn 19 and age out?”
Yes they can [stick around], but Hack Club is really meant for high school students and high school is different in different parts of the world. If you are in college / university, Hack Club isn’t really meant for you. We won’t kick you out until you turn 19, but we ask you make space for high schoolers
- Zach Latta (@zrl)
Internships
Every summer, gap-years (gappies) and interns are flown out to Vermont to run YSWS programs and build cool tools for Hack Clubbers.
Internships are for 13 - 18 year-olds, but gap years are for 16 - 19 year-olds. As an intern or gappie, you’ll work closely with HQ staff to build and maintain programs, events, and resources for the Hack Club community. Even if you’re not a 10x programmer or have a lot of experience with technology, you should apply anyway. Hack Club chooses the people they think will run the best YSWS programs next year, not the most impressive people or the people with the most credentials. It wouldn’t hurt to contribute to Hack Club through open-source or running a good Hack Club club at your school or by hosting a high-quality YSWS event/hackathon but it isn’t strictly a requirement.
These are paid, full time positions. Internships are usually 3-6 weeks long during the summer, while gap years are for teens that want to take a year off between high school and college to work full time at Hack Club HQ.
Housing is provided for free for interns but not for gappies. Gappies have to find and sign their own leases for housing.
Lynn wrote about her experience at Hack Club as an intern if you want to read it: https://headpats.you/interning-at-hack-club-2025/
Evan wrote a piece about the philosophy behind how Hack Club chooses who to accept for a gap year: https://news.hackclub.com/how-to-get-a-gap-year/
Privacy
Hack Club cares about privacy a ton. I’m sure you’ve heard that from souless corporations like “we value your privacy,” but Hack Club knows the value of the information they hold: it’s childrens’ information.
With Idv (Hack Club Identity - what’s used to verify that Hack Clubbers are actually students), they encrypt data to prevent data leakage from a person logging onto the server and stealing the data (they need the password to decrypt it), make the employees that verify students sign NDAs, and limit the sharing of data to a need-to-know basis.