This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of people worldwide, shut down businesses globally, and sent countries into lockdowns. The disruptions have started to threaten global food supply by cutting off supply chains and increasing food insecurity. The intricate network of food supply chains involving farmers, processing plants, fleet management systems, and retailers is under constant threat. In such unprecedented times, being aware of other people’s needs and helping each other is the least we could do. Propel firmly realizes that we all are in this together, and there is nothing as heartbreaking as not having food on the table.
As a 1% Pledge company, Propel pledges 1% of our time quarterly to organizations and charities in our local area. We believe in giving back to our communities as often as we can. Considering the lockdown in effect, this time our team of Propellerheads came together and donated to several food banks across the country.
As a company initiative, Propel initially decided to match all donations up to $5,000. We are humbled to announce that we raised and matched an overwhelming donation amount of $6,689.40 for Second Harvest and several other local food banks across the country. We are delighted to support our commitment as a company to do good.
Also, recently, as a part of our corporate initiative to fight against COVID-19, we launched Propel’s Healthcare Manufacture Community (HMC) to help build ventilators and other medical devices as quickly as possible. This free community is designed to help engineers, suppliers, distributors, manufacturers, and other professionals make faster production of medical devices a reality. To learn more about our community and to join it for free, please register here.
For more information on the community, read a recent blog from our founder, Ray Hein, announcing the HMC launch. Please email us to suggest additional products, suppliers, or other improvements that would benefit the community.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
Originally posted on Pluralsight.com
The COVID-19 pandemic has put new pressures on the way we live, learn and take care of one another. We’re social distancing, we’re caring for the sick, we’re doing our best to stay safe and healthy and flatten the curve. And that looks different for each and every one of us.
For vulnerable communities across the globe, this health crisis is compounding the crises already taking place
Refugees and displaced people have been experiencing one of the greatest and most challenging disruptions to everyday life long before COVID-19 turned our world on its head. But for many people who are displaced and living in densely populated camps or fleeing from home, the number one recommendation—social distancing—is often impossible. There’s an overwhelming lack of sufficient water and sanitation resources. Healthcare systems are insufficient and stressed. Xenophobia is on the rise and armed conflicts are forcing people to flee, inhibiting their ability to shelter in place.
Our students are trying to learn under new, challenging circumstances. According to a recent UNESCO report, 91% of the world’s students are experiencing disruptions in learning. Across the globe, girls have already been fighting for the right to education, a fight that has gotten that much harder with COVID-19 introducing new barriers to education. With sweeping school closures, teachers are pivoting their lesson plans quickly to accommodate distance learning. Devices and connectivity aren’t universally available which increases inequality in education. Computer science, an elective at most schools, is on the chopping block.
Unemployment rates have reached unprecedented numbers, with the crisis disproportionately impacting low-income families and people of color. With housing, food, connectivity and device security at risk, these communities are struggling to stay afloat.
Now more than ever, we must demonstrate our love of humanity
Pluralsight One’s commitment has always been to drive significant, lasting social impact by supporting our vulnerable communities, improving equal access to technology skills and investing in catalytic solutions. We believe this focus is more important today than ever before.
To help support our communities throughout this crisis, we’re granting $1.25M to support Pluralsight One’s nonprofit partners and bolster regional COVID-19 emergency responses in the communities where we live and work. We are providing nimble capital to our partners in support of tech-enabled health and education aid locally and globally with a focus on the most vulnerable populations. In addition, we have expanded our product solutions for nonprofits, teachers and students to ensure they can build the skills they need at this critical time.
How we’re deploying funds through Pluralsight One to help our partners weather this crisis
$250,000 grant to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)
In addition to our already scheduled 2020 grant of $250,000, we’re issuing immediate additional funding to NRC to enable the development and deployment of digital and tech-enabled field-based solutions to support their global COVID-19 response. This will help prevent the spread in camp settings, enable teams to create digital solutions that serve the most vulnerable and focus resources on flattening the curve while maintaining critical, life-saving programs and services.
$300,000 grant to Malala Fund
This grant will span two years and support the work of five champions across Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan who are focused on developing and implementing tech-enabled solutions to girls’ education and responding to immediate community needs during the COVID-19 crisis.
$250,000 grant to the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA)
Computer science is marginalized in K-12 schools nationwide, and as a result, it’s at heightened risk of being cut during school closures. Pluralsight One is supporting the development and implementation of digital resources for teachers with a focus on equity and inclusion. This support will:
- Help develop teacher resources that enable learning continuity during COVID-19
- Scale the CSTA Equity Fellowship to grow and establish an active Equity Fellow Alumni network
- Continue to build capacity and sustain CSTA’s chaptersDevelop rigorous professional development that grows the number of English language learner students enrolled in AP computer science
To support students and teachers during this time, we’ve also published a list of helpful resources to keep our students engaged and learning.
$250,000 grant to Year Up
Pluralsight One is supporting Year Up’s COVID-19 Emergency Fund, which enables learning continuity for program participants, interns and alumni. It also supports the organization’s work to assess and address evolving student hardship needs, ensure program continuity for current participants (including providing access to connectivity and laptops for students to operate virtually) and responding to youths’ urgent health and financial needs.
$200,000 to regional COVID-19 Emergency Funds
Pluralsight One is supporting the COVID-19 response in communities where our team members live and work through grants of $50,000 each to the Utah COVID Fund, Boston COVID Fund, Ireland Community Foundation’s COVID Fund and UN/WHO COVID Fund.
We’re all in this together
We remain committed to our partners and invested in their work and resilience. We are grateful for their expertise and tenacity in the face of challenging times and applaud the courage with which they are operating to provide life-saving programs and services at this critical time.
We have also built a set of free resources for nonprofits, teachers and students to help with learning continuity and tech skills development. Nonprofits can access Pluralsight One’s full suite of products at a deep discount or test out Pluralsight One’s Amplify solution with a 30-day free trial. That includes 7,000+ expert-led courses and advanced skills analytics to help you measure impact and progress. All educators who are CSTA members get free access to 30+ computer science courses that are mapped to national exams and aligned with CS curriculum. And high school students around the world can get free access to over 500 hours of Pluralsight courses to continue their studies and build the critical tech skills needed to land a great job. Learn what’s available and sign up for free access here.
If you’d like to get involved in Pluralsight One’s COVID-19 response efforts, please donate here or email impact@pluralsightone.org.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
In these challenging times, Dash is here to continue connecting the world in real-time as a community through radio. While many are feeling the emptiness of isolation, Dash is curated by live people-not algorithms. We are proud of our 450+ live hosts and DJs across 80 premium stations; there is something for everyone to pass the time, ease the tension, feel connected, or bring back fond memories.
We understand current circumstances are difficult for many people financially, and with economic uncertainty ahead of us, we want to emphasize that a quality ad-free audio experience is still what we do best. Dash is 100% free to use and free of traditional ads, and will remain this way!
In direct response to the pandemic, the Dash team has partnered with Providence St. Joseph Health & Ergo to introduce the first 24/7 Live COVID-19 update station, providing facts and guidance direct from clinical experts on how to protect yourself and updates on the spread of the virus as this information becomes available. We have partnered with various charities, including LA Regional Food Bank and Recording Academy Musicares, to raise money for those in need during this crisis.
In these extraordinary times, Silicon Valley Bank is doing some things differently. But what’s unchanged, as the world fights COVID-19, is our more than 35-year commitment to support our clients, our employees, our business partners and our partners in philanthropy. We are helping our clients adapt to rapid change and we are emphasizing our values to guide SVB COVID-19 charitable activities. We strive to be helpful, relevant and timely and fortify innovation as our north star.
At the outset of the pandemic, we laid out a multipronged philanthropic strategy that builds on our relationships with trusted partners, recognizes that the immense needs would quickly scale, and leverages the power and engagement of our extensive network in centers of innovation across the globe.
SVB is targeting philanthropic efforts in three primary areas: health, shelter and food security, and small business relief. The bank has committed $5.5 million to COVID-19 charitable relief initiatives across the nine countries and 15 US states where the bank operates. This includes corporate contributions to global, national and regional charities, direct community-based giving and tripling our match for employees’ donations to relevant causes where they are located. In addition, SVB announced that it will contribute net Paycheck Protection Program loan origination fees it receives from the Small Business Administration to relief efforts.
Our philanthropic efforts are immensely rewarding, and we are only getting started. Thanks to our strong partners, including Pledge 1%, exceptional SVB global team and our proven leadership in the innovation sector, we are aiming to invest and contribute where the need is most acute.
Engaging Community and Global Support
The COVID-19-related donations, which are being augmented by a 3:1 employee match, are directed by our regional office leaders to address the most urgent local needs. For example, SVB contributions have gone to purchase personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, resupply food banks and provide short term help for low-income families. The SVB Foundation is partnering with employees who volunteer at non-profit organizations to support those groups most impacted by the pandemic at an accelerated pace.
SVB, in partnership with Founders Pledge, developed the COVID-19 Global Impact & Innovation Fund, which we seeded with a $1 million contribution. Our goal is to identify and consolidate into a single fund several high-impact organizations that are focused on activities to help slow COVID-19’s spread, provide immediate relief to those affected and get better prepared for future pandemics. The fund is accepting contributions from the general public.
Access to Innovation
SVB’s Access to Innovation initiative is launching a monthly virtual series for emerging professionals to help them establish a network and get career coaching. These sessions are designed to address technical skills and provide vital career and networking guidance for young professionals who may not have had an opportunity or thought to consider a career in the innovation economy. The initial late April session attracted 76 young professionals and partners who got a first-hand lesson from an SVB banker of why developing data analytics skills is key for job readiness.
Startup and Small Business Resources
SVB is supporting emergency small business grants of $10,000 through Hello Alice’s Business for All initiative. It hosts a free COVID-19 Business Resource Center that is focused on linking women- and minority-owned businesses to relief programs, funding opportunities, mentors and other support programs at local and national levels.
Join Us
SVB has thrived for more than three decades by leading with our values. None of us can know what the future will hold but we are committed to preparing in order to help our clients, employees and communities manage through this difficult time. Together, we are stronger. To learn more, please visit SVB COVID-19 Response & Community Support here.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19. You can read the original post on the Twilio blog.
By Erin Reilly, Twilio.
Communicating with people during a crisis—whether they’re experiencing abuse, a natural disaster, mental health challenges, or otherwise—is never easy.
These communications require incredible empathy and immediate response from the nonprofits, governments, and healthcare agencies providing care.
COVID-19 is making communications in crisis even harder.
Spikes in unemployment, increased anxiety from the pandemic, and shelter-in-place ordinances have driven up demand for many social services. City governments and health care agencies are working to serve unprecedented numbers of people, as are the nonprofits that support with humanitarian services, emergency food distribution, mental health care, sexual abuse recovery, and more.
At the same time these service organizations experience increased demand, they also have had to find a way to shift their operations to remote work wherever possible. When it rains, it pours.
To adapt to the new conditions and serve our communities best, organizations on the front lines are optimizing for agility, accessibility, and scale.
Adapting technology quickly to new environments
Most organizations change technologies on a 6-12 month timeline.
COVID-19 has made that timeline feel like an eternity.
To keep employees and members safe, organizations have adapted their programming to remote environments—with new communication channels—and in a matter of days, not months.
Given how critical their work is to at-risk communities right now, nonprofit and service organizations are leading the way. They are rethinking their processes entirely, eliminating red tape, shortening approval processes, and embracing new technology.
For the City of Pittsburgh’s IT department, changing technologies previously took months of vetting, testing, and procurement. When they received the order to move all IT help desk and 311 call center employees home, they needed to do it immediately to keep city employees safe—many of which are in higher-risk groups.
“Digital government is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity,” said Santiago Garces, Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer for the City of Pittsburgh. “I believe the lessons learned during COVID about how government can be agile and move quickly will change the way we work forever moving forward.”
Similar to the City of Pittsburgh, Lifeline Australia, a 24-hour Telephone Crisis Support service, had to make swift changes to support remote call supervision. In one week, they spun up an entirely cloud-based and remote escalation portal. Crisis supporters can escalate urgent cases to supervisors, and debrief each case remotely via webchat.
Ensuring communities can access critical services
Many organizations are working to serve patients, at-risk communities, and constituents that don’t have access to smartphones or reliable Wi-Fi.
According to Pew Research, 29 percent of low income households don’t have access to a smartphone, and 44 percent also don’t have access to reliable internet. This lack of digital access is compounded with soaring unemployment and school closures.
As a result, web pages, mobile applications, and email are not viable options to reach this group. To ensure their services are accessible to everyone who needs them, many organizations are adopting SMS:
- Stopcovid.co offers an SMS training program to help essential workers, like grocery store clerks and delivery workers, get up to speed on COVID safety.
- Kinvolved helps school districts and teachers keep parents up to date on their children’s assignments in 80+ languages via SMS.
- And Plentiful, a technology partner for City Harvest and the United Way, provides an SMS shortcode for New York City residents to text in to schedule a time to pick up meals from a food pantry.
Accessible channels are more important than ever given the increased demands for services. Kinvolved has seen a 200 percent increase in messages per student over the past month, with more and more parent-teacher communications moving digital. Plentiful has seen a 62 percent increase in residents texting in for food appointments due to the financial impact of the COVID crisis. Their SMS platform has empowered food pantries to continue to keep patrons and volunteers at a safe distance.
Scale communications systems to handle increased demand
The number of calls city governments, healthcare providers, and crisis services are fielding is going through the roof. As a result, organizations are moving to new cloud-based systems built for scale, automation, and work from home environments.
“It is an unprecedented time in healthcare as we face caring for increasing numbers of patients affected by the virus with limited capacity. Our vital healthcare resources are constrained in ways never seen before,” said Lisa Romano, MSN, RN, Chief Nursing Officer at CipherHealth, a patient communication platform,.
To manage this increased demand, organizations are conserving limited staff resources for the most difficult cases by offering self-service options for patients and constituents to get answers to common questions.
For questions that can’t be answered with automation, organizations are building systems to route the most urgent and unique cases to doctors, counselors, and trained city staff, ensuring callers are responded to quickly. Many are adopting video conferencing to escalate these difficult cases.
Organizations like CipherHealth are deploying chatbots and intelligent voice response systems to help answer common inquiries and identify symptoms before a provider joins a call.
United Way also built an intelligent voice response system into its 211 hotline, the easy to remember number that helps people identify and access social services they are eligible for. Due to the coronavirus, 211 networks nationwide have been seeing 2-4x call volume, at 75,000 calls per day, and some call durations averaging 20 to 30 minutes, compared to their average 4 to 6.
To scale up their service, the United Way developed a streamlined routing system with interactive voice response (IVR). People can call in to a single 1-800 number or their local 211, where they are testing an artificial intelligence-assisted IVR bot to help answer commonly asked questions about COVID-19 and related services. If the caller still wants to speak to a specialist about their unique situation, they are routed based on their location to a live agent.
We’re here to help
It’s been amazing to witness how nonprofit, public sector, and healthcare organizations across the world are demonstrating an unprecedented level of innovation—not to mention grit—to scale up operations and adapt to remote work with limited resources.
At Twilio, we work with many organizations providing crisis response services. Our customer engagement platform enables organizations to quickly pivot to working from home, reach constituents on common channels, and scale up to handle increased loads.
To support organizations serving the most at-risk populations, Twilio.org launched our Crisis Response and Prevention Initiative last year to support and fund organizations in this space and bring together the best minds in technology to serve people in crisis.
Today, we’re offering a number of programs to help organizations directly responding to the crisis caused by the coronavirus.
- We’ve expanded eligibility for our Impact Access program, which provides $500 in Twilio product credits plus additional 25% discounts beyond nonprofits to any organization providing direct response efforts benefiting the public around COVID.
- Twilio Video is now free for three months for healthcare, education, and nonprofit institutions.
- Twilio Flex, our contact center product, is giving 20,000 free hours per month to organizations helping with direct response through August 31.
- We’ll soon open a grant round to fund organizations helping at-risk communities recover from COVID. You can sign up for updates here.
- Our team is standing by if you want to connect about technical advice or building solutions together.
Supporting people in crisis has never been easy, and the coronavirus has challenged us all in ways we could have never anticipated. I’m encouraged by the innovation I’ve seen in the social impact space to adapt to this new environment and emerge stronger together.
To connect with Twilio on how we might be able to collaborate on solutions, reach out to us here. We’d love to hear how we can help.
Glowforge – Lasercut mask designs and initiative to print and distribute one million “ear savers”
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has changed our daily lives. Here at Crunchbase, we recognize and appreciate how lucky we are to be able to function as a remote team and adapt our company goals to respond to changing circumstances.
Though we are not the medical workers on the front lines fighting this pandemic, or the researchers tirelessly working to discover a vaccine, our teams were quick to think about how we can use the resources we do have in our little corner of the world to help business and entrepreneurs navigate these uncertain times.
From hosting a “COVID-19 Hack Day” to donating to and spreading awareness about nonprofits making an impact, here are a few details about our COVID-19 response thus far:
- Remote work: Our employees began working from home on March 9 – earlier than most companies in our community – to keep our employees and community safe and reduce potential exposure to the virus.
- COVID-19 Hack Day: We dedicated an entire work day to find ways to give back to the community and use our strengths for good on “COVID-19 Hack Day.”
- News coverage: Our news team has been hard at work covering the impact of COVID-19 on businesses and startups, but has also made time to keep things positive and cover startups giving back in this time of crisis.
- COVID-19 resources:
- Blog post: Our CEO, Jager McConnell, created a resource blog post for Crunchbase users and visitors that includes helpful lists to find potential prospects for businesses, information about where to go for industry-specific news and updates, tips from experts, recruiting and hiring resources, and ways to give back to the community in this time of crisis.
- Expert advice: We called on our network of entrepreneurs and business leaders who have experienced previous economic downturns to share advice on how to keep businesses afloat and compiled a resource center for people to find helpful information.
- Vlog: Our CEO also published his first ever vlog, on the PPP loan – what it is, who qualifies for it, and why it isn’t just “free money.”
- Charitable donations:
- Upon going fully remote, we reworked an existing weekly award program for our employees. Each week two employees are chosen by their colleagues for outstanding work and now win the opportunity to contribute $500 to a charity of their choice. Crunchbase also matches any additional donations to the charity picks of the week if additional employees donate. In less than two months, we have contributed over $8,000 to about 20 local and global nonprofits.
At the beginning of April, we made a donation to Direct Relief to provide PPE and essential medical items to frontline responders.
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
Read the original article on the Salesforce blog.
At Salesforce, we believe that business is the greatest platform for change and we have a responsibility to give back to our communities. We are proud to join the #GivingTuesdayNow movement and use our platform to support COVID-19 response efforts.
Through our philanthropic investments, employee engagement efforts, and our technology, we are committed to helping in every way we can during the COVID-19 crisis. We know that disasters magnify existing inequities. The people who are hurt the most are those who are marginalized: communities of color, low-income individuals and families, people experiencing homelessness, immigrants, and refugees for example. COVID-19 is no exception. We are seeing the pandemic disproportionately impact vulnerable populations around the world. You can read more about our philanthropic efforts around COVID-19 here.
Ahead of #GivingTuesdayNow, we shared resources to help our 45,000 Salesforce.org customers and others in the nonprofit community make the most of this global movement by engaging their supporters. We hosted a LinkedIn AMA to answer questions from nonprofits and partnered with the GivingTuesday foundation on a blog post: 5 Ways Nonprofits Can Prepare for #GivingTuesdayNow. We focused our broader #GivingTuesdayNow communications on sharing the multitude of ways that individuals and organizations can give back to support their communities. We shared original content on our blog and social media channels focusing on different ways to give, such as inspiring virtual volunteering examples and ideas for saying thank you to those on the frontlines of the pandemic.
We also called on our 50,000+ employees to give back in the ways that resonate most with them. We launched an internal communications campaign to share resources for employees to give back, including sharing Salesforce Pro Bono volunteer opportunities and drawing attention to our company donation matching program. Salesforce employees have now logged 5 million volunteer hours! The fact that we reached this milestone in the midst of a global pandemic that has disrupted how we live, work, and volunteer makes the achievement even more remarkable.
“The world may be in lockdown, but Salesforce employees continue to do what they do best: give back to their communities,” said Ebony Beckwith, Chief Philanthropy Officer of Salesforce.
Our Equality Groups, employee-led organizations that support and celebrate our underrepresented communities, answered the call-to-action by launching a campaign to deliver relief to those most vulnerable. Through this campaign, Equality Groups matched donations to philanthropic partners up to $10,000 in addition to Salesforce’s matches to employee donations.
We’re proud of our employees, customers, and Pledge 1% partners who joined this wave of generosity, engagement, and action. We look forward to continuing these cross-sector partnerships to support those who are most impacted.
By Heather Jin, Global Head of Social Impact at Medallia
This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
In June 2019, Medallia formalized our social impact arm, Medallia.org, and signed Pledge 1% to commit our two superpowers — product and people powers — for social good. Now, Medallia.org is committed to doing our part in relief efforts and supporting nonprofits, who are among the most vital yet vulnerable organizations currently.
Product Power
To help nonprofits overcome challenges due to COVID-19, we are providing Medallia Crowdicity, our crowdsourcing tool, free for 6 months to new nonprofit customers. To ensure organizations quickly obtain value, we have pre-packaged the tool with COVID-19 specific templates co-designed with our current nonprofits partners — to help organizations crowdsource immediate needs and actionable ideas from their communities on issues like how to prepare the most vulnerable for disasters, engage employees and volunteers remotely, and stay financially resilient through crisis.
We are honored to enable over 30 nonprofits globally with Crowdicity, and these inspirational stories embody Medallia’s mission to create a world where everyone has a voice:
- Alzheimer’s Society is crowdsourcing immediate obstacles and gaps in services from the over 200 people with dementia and carers on their Crowdicity platform. In a matter of weeks through data sourced in Crowdicity, they have started creating an online community center to tackle isolation, will begin to distribute devices to care homes helping patients stay connected with loved ones, and more.
- Through government and nonprofit collaboration between the UK Department of Health and Social Care, UK Bioindustry Association, the British In Vitro Diagnostic Association and the Royal College of Pathologists, Crowdicity is being utilized to address UK’s target of 100k coronavirus tests per day by the end of April — they have sourced over 130 solutions to challenges such as how to speed up COVID-19 antibody testing.
If you’re a 501(c)3 or international equivalent nonprofit organization, contact us to learn how you can receive 6 months of Medallia Crowdicity at no-cost.
People Power
We are empowering Medallians to give back to causes they are passionate about through our Volunteer-Time-Off policy, where every employee has 3 days per calendar year to volunteer. For example, Medallians all over the world volunteered for CareerVillage.org by sharing career advice and supporting students and families that have been impacted by school closures. In addition, we are hosting information sessions spotlighting nonprofits facing greatly increased demand and in urgent need of virtual volunteers, as well as highlighting the inspirational Medallians giving in their own ways.
We are committed now more than ever to create a world where everyone has a voice — so we can collectively listen and work together in our fight against COVID-19.
