Every day, we hear more news about various refugee crises around the world. We want to work with you, our Pledge 1% members and partners, to explore concrete ways that companies can help.
Pledge 1% is launching a Humanitarian Relief Series for our members and partners to hone in on current and emerging trends related to humanitarian issues and needs around the world. While some of this content will be Ukraine-specific as the war continues and needs evolve, we will also highlight other global challenges and opportunities for collaboration and engagement.
Want to be a part of the movement? Follow this post for links to all events, discussions, and case studies around this topic.
- Resource Compilation – Supporting the Ukraine (Forum Post & Conversation): A master list of resources and organizations to help support the Ukraine.
- Contextualizing the Refugee Crisis (Event Recap & Resources): Sasha Chanoff, founder and CEO of humanitarian organization RefugePoint, walks through how we should think about the refugee crisis and how companies can help.
- The Ukraine Crisis: Meeting Economic and Physical Needs through Technology (Event Recap & Resources): See how Twilio, Airbnb, and Unity worked with on-the-ground organizations like Norwegian Refugee Council to marry their technologies with immediate needs.
- Welcoming & Supporting Refugees (Event Recap & Resources): Nazanin Ash, CEO of Welcome.US, explains how businesses can support refugees through hiring, investment, and partnerships. She offers advice and specific case studies.
- Remote Work Training Opportunity for Refugees (Forum Post): @robfrogger shares an organization (https://opendoorpolicy.io/) that helps train refugees for digital work – a great way to spend a time or product pledge! Especially for Salesforce agencies.
Stay tuned for more events, discussions, and articles around this issue!
Pledge 1%’s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Mani Anand
Founder and CEO at Apphienz
San Diego, California, United States
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
My role in the organization entails overlooking the entire business, engaging with clients, learning about their challenges, and troubleshooting their pain points, along with managing my global team. My team and I help companies and nonprofit organizations with their Salesforce instance and solve all Salesforce-related queries.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
The most cherished part of my job is interacting with my existing and potential clients. Solving their biggest, smallest and most significant problems stimulates me. I work solely for the joy of satisfaction that I get at the end of the day knowing that I’ve been able to make some difference in my client’s business or a Nonprofit organization. Working with various nonprofits fuels my soul.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years – what motivates you to keep going?
The past two years have been nothing short of a tragedy for the entire world, the remnants of which will be witnessed by the upcoming generations. That said, what kept me going is my family, my work, my purpose which I strongly believe in, and my supporting group of close-knit friends. Moreover, being a small business owner myself, the amount of agility and resilience shown by small businesses during these times pushes me to keep going.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
The best piece of advice I ever received is to focus on the positive qualities of people. They might be going through their fair share of struggles and challenges we never know about. The best we can do, not judge them in the first instance and focus on their negative qualities.
What does generosity mean to you?
To me, generosity is being sensitive to others’ situations and helping them overcome hardships with my knowledge and skills.
How do you feel businesses can play a larger role in solving today’s biggest challenges? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
There are a plethora of small and big challenges that are being faced by the world today anywhere from hunger to poverty, from lack of sanitation facilities to child marriages, etc. We tackle these one at a time if every business comes together and does its bit to make the world a better place. At our level, we have been working with several nonprofit organizations during the pandemic to help them raise funds for their organization. We take up projects to catch a fire or do pro bono projects to support some great nonprofits working to make our world a better place. We want to make sure we help as many organizations as we can.
We supported an LA-based Nonprofit on a Pro Bono basis which generated significant differences in their organization like streamlining the processes that helped them raise more funds and gave them 360-degree visibility of their data. This gave them more time to focus on doing what they do best, making the world a better place rather than focusing and worrying about the data.
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Passionate. Whatever I have done in my life so far has always been with the utmost amount of passion and devotion. Growing up, there have been many challenges like juggling between work and home. Taking care of two kids who were 1.5 years apart in age is a task in itself. It was only my passion to start my own company and to make this world a better place that keeps me thriving.
If you could pick a song to guide you through 2022, which song would it be?
Lights will guide you home – Coldplay
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
Professionally, there is a profusion of exciting projects in the pipeline that I am most excited about. Partnering with several nonprofits around the world. Personally, I’m looking forward to traveling with my family and spending quality time with them. Pandemic was a difficult time for all of us and we did not get a chance to travel so a nice getaway is something I’m really looking forward to.
Pledge 1%’s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Ishveen Jolly
CEO + Founder, OpenSponsorship
London, UK (But the company is in the US and I was pre-pandemic based in NYC)
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
I am the CEO of OpenSponsorship, the world’s largest two-sided marketplace connecting brands and athletes for digital marketing campaigns.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
I love our company mission and seeing my team get behind this mission and bringing it to life. Watching the team that you have brought in, perform and deliver is the most enjoyable thing.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years – what motivates you to keep going?
As above, I love our mission. Making sponsorship accessible to all – seeing brands be able to leverage athletes and sports in their marketing campaigns. Also, for athletes sponsorship can be the difference between being able to enter a competition or training vs. playing. We love sponsorship so bringing innovation to the industry is amazing.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
The entrepreneurship journey is hard, so enjoy the little wins, celebrate them and move quickly on from the failures – learn from them but don’t dwell.
What does generosity mean to you?
It means giving to others who need it – financially, time, advice, opportunity – anything counts.
How do you feel businesses can play a larger role in solving today’s biggest challenges? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
Sponsorship is essentially the way that one entity can leverage the influence of an athlete to drive home key messaging. We have worked on some really important campaigns e.g. with the likes of Texas and Florida Government during COVID to promote safety and vaccines; we have worked with companies on using athletes to promote financial literacy and many more important campaigns. As we grow we think about how we can support more CSR initiatives.
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Resilient – I have the ability to keep going, despite the odds.
If you could pick a song to guide you through 2022, which song would it be?
Something without lyrics so I could play it in the background and keep working
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
We just raised a growth round, so it’s an exciting year for us hiring, growing, building more processes and delivering our investors and team results.
Pledge 1%’s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Karen Lee
Senior Director, Saberpoint
New York, NY
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
Head of Salesforce Practice at Saberpoint. I am responsible for presales activities, implementing solutions, recruiting, training, and partnering with vendors to meet clients’ delivery needs and scalability.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
My clients. I truly enjoy the industry of small to medium businesses and how I can service that sector with my technology and data expertise. It’s challenging and fun to work in this sector in evaluating a full technical stack and identifying the solutions that meet the business needs, budget and scalability.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years – what motivates you to keep going?
My CEO, my team, my daughter, my friends – They always remind me how much brighter things truly are.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Never Fear.
What does generosity mean to you?
Generosity is generosity of the heart. Empathy and action oriented care for society as a whole.
How do you feel businesses can play a larger role in solving today’s biggest challenges? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
Businesses can play a strong impacting role. I think many have already and can definitely do more. Every person can also contribute in many ways that will help in the overall cause for betterment of society. Businesses can better support monetarily than an individual can, but individuals can share time, ideas and empathy which is the action. We need both of these to be complementary.
Saberpoint as an organization that supports many causes monetarily. I will progress with a series of actions as an individual and/or team to push forward these causes.
– I volunteer as an adjunct professor at Pace University to mentor and teach the younger generation.
– I am an advocate of inclusion by supporting young women and minority group in their path to career success.
– My team and I volunteer for non profit project with organizations such as taproot.org or catchafire.org
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Nice. I know, it sounds bland. When I have year-end reviews since I started my career, my feedback from all my managers is “You are too nice.” They made it seem like it was a negative, but I was who I was and I didn’t know how to change that. As I matured and learned to embrace this feedback, my response back is “I got here because of my personality and there is no such thing as too nice.”
If you could pick a song to guide you through 2022, which song would it be?
This is a funny question, “Work from Home” by Fifth Harmony
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
My goal every year is the same. Maximize my learning to be used to assist others.
Originally posted on investor.zuora.com
At Zuora, we strive to make a positive impact on the world and to empower others to do the same. That’s why we are thrilled to share Zuora’s first inaugural Environment, Social & Governance (ESG) Impact Report, which shares both existing and new disclosures and commitments.
Find the report here.
Pledge 1%’s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Mousumi Behari
Digital Transformation Lead, Avionos
Chicago, IL, USA
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
I lead the Digital Transformation practice at Avionos where I’m responsible for Strategy and Change Management for several Fortune 100 companies. Additionally I founded AWLN, which is our women’s leadership network where our mission is to support women in professional and personal growth.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
I enjoy problem solving. Often companies will have complex issues to solve, whether it’s their lack of technology, inconsistent processes, or it may even be not knowing what to do next. Coming up with an actionable strategy, working with bright minds in various industries, and then seeing their successes is what makes my job exciting.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years – what motivates you to keep going?
During the pandemic I started a practice to feed my mind, body and soul before I begin the day. An hour of working out, meditation and prayer really helps me to focus on what are usually jam packed and challenging days.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
To be authentic.
What does generosity mean to you?
I really value the idea of paying it forward and lending mentorship and time to those who it would help.
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Multi-faceted. I have a lot of varied interests and like to explore and learn new things.
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
I concepted the idea of Little CEO’s a few years ago, which is a virtual summer camp to help girls ages 7-12 come up with a business idea, logo and share and present it. It was a great success, and this year will be our 3rd year. I hope every year it continues to gain traction and we have alums come back and talk about their successes.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Last year I co-founded a podcast called Overworked which is about the intersection of women and business. It’s available on Spotify and Apple and speaks to the struggles and successes women tend to have.
Originally posted on DigitalJournal.com
Litify, the end-to-end legal operations platform for law firms and legal departments, today announced its partnership with The Noble Law, a women-owned plaintiffs’ employment law firm founded on the principles of diversity, empathy, equity, integrity, inclusion, and innovation. As the industry’s most comprehensive legal operations solution, Litify will provide The Noble Law with a complete and transparent view of its customers, cases, and staff across every touchpoint — ultimately giving employees time back in their day to focus on delivering excellent client service. With a rich history of protecting workers’ rights, the selection of Litify solidifies The Noble Law’s commitment to producing superior legal outcomes for its clients.
“Working with multiple providers and products proved difficult when measuring workflow efficiency and internal productivity. Clients who reach out to us are often calling during one of the worst crises of their lives. Having data at our fingertips allows us to move quickly and thoroughly respond to our clients’ needs and help them navigate what is typically a very stressful process,” said Laura Noble, founder and managing partner of The Noble Law. “Litify’s cloud-based technology will empower our staff to collaborate with clients more efficiently while enabling data-driven decisions to support successful outcomes.”
By centralizing workflows and case information onto Litify, The Noble Law will benefit from enhanced collaboration and better business performance. The Noble Law also chose Litify for its matter management features, which include automation and practice-specific task management and document creation capabilities. The Noble Law is confident the change will also improve the client’s journey from intake to resolution of their matter.
“When The Noble Law outlined the firm’s need to quickly create and edit templates, as well as the ability to incorporate client information directly from the system into their documents, we knew Docrio, Litify’s integrated document management and creation product, would be the right solution,” said Litify CSO Steven Mandel.
Powered by Salesforce, Litify puts an end to document overload with advanced OCR search, drag-and-drop functionality, intuitive file structures, and other features that make document management painless. Unlike other document management solutions, Docrio is seamlessly integrated into each matter within Litify, which saves the team from having to do double data entry or losing information in translation from matter management to document creation.
“We are thrilled to partner with such a progressive law firm that will benefit from our automation capabilities, helping the team save time, increase productivity and drive results in this very critical sector of the law,” Mandel said. “Above all else, we are honored to be working with this innovative women-led firm to make strides toward a more inclusive and representative legal industry culture.”
About Litify
Founded in 2016, Litify’s end-to-end legal operations platform transforms how legal services are delivered through flexible, intuitive technology. Built on Salesforce, Litify streamlines and automates matter and task management, document generation, timekeeping, billing, and client communications while providing data-driven insights that help law firms, in-house legal departments, and government agencies scale and improve their financial performance. As a proud member of Pledge 1%, Litify donates 1% of its time, money, and resources to charitable causes every year through its charitable arm Litify.org. This year, Litify was named a “soonicorn” by Tracxn Emerging Startups. To learn more about Litify, or see our open roles, visit www.litify.com.
About The Noble Law
The Noble Law, a women-owned legal practice, is a recognized leader in employment law with offices in New York, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Charleston. The firm’s goal is to level the playing field for employees and work to deliver outcomes with integrity and empathy for the client’s journey. Noble’s success is measured by delivering positive impacts for its clients and serving as a catalyst for changes in employment law and society. For more information, go to thenoblelaw.com.
Three Starting Points To Effective Social Impact
Originally posted on Forbes.com
The last few years have taught us some powerful lessons and made us realize just how connected our world has become. Importantly, we have seen that despite the very real hardships in the world, there is also an immense amount of good, with people working together in small and large ways toward bettering our society. Such events have led to the higher prioritization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and made CEOs and leaders take a closer look at how they are managing their teams, business and philanthropy.
At DigitalOcean, we have always held “Love is at Our Core” as an intrinsic value. It was with love that our first official social impact program was launched in 2018, Hub for Good. Last year, at our IPO, we announced that we’d change the name to Hollie’s Hub for Good to honor a beloved employee who suddenly passed away just before we went public. We also joined the Pledge 1% movement, committing to spend at least $50 million over the next 10 years to build DO Impact, our social impact platform.
I believe in managing a business to optimize outcomes for customers, employees and investors, and it’s also my belief that an important element is to also address the communities our core constituencies are a part of. As a derivative, we also have to be mindful of their communities as a lever to drive this optimization. It’s Ben Franklin’s concept of “doing well by doing good.” The two are not mutually exclusive and work best when they are both aligned with the company’s mission.
Give The Initiative The Respect It Deserves
We owe it to employees and communities to do more to engage and to leverage our talent and our assets to help the communities in which we live and the customers we serve.
Corporate social impact must be given its place as a fundamental business unit. Whether that means a full department, a part-time role or a committee of employees, it must have an organizational structure with goals, budget and accountability.
Any official program will need a champion and leader to activate and empower initiatives targeted to have a broader social impact. This may not be at a vice president or C-level, but ultimately there needs to be a person leading the charge.
Like any other internal organization, a social impact team must be held responsible for the outcomes of its program. The initiative and the people who have made CSR their career path are owed the respect of that kind of responsibility.
Find Ways To Be A Force Multiplier
An effective social impact program must look beyond its office walls to have a significant impact. Particularly for companies in technology, their greatest assets tend to be the technology they create, the customers they serve and the people they employ. Use these assets to be a force multiplier and exponentially increase your impact.
Gartner this year released a study that revealed 56% of respondents stated that the pandemic made them want to contribute more to society. Employees want to contribute something good to the world, and business leaders should be looking at that as an opportunity to harness. Arm your employees and customers with products and resources to be the force for change, and they will do it willingly.
In addition to committing capital and matching employee donations on a regular basis, take it a step further by encouraging and sponsoring them to donate time and expertise to nonprofits and NGOs. This effort supports our community with valuable knowledge, but it also supports employees’ desire to be change-makers and adds additional meaning to their lives and livelihoods.
Hold Yourself And The Company Accountable
Measuring performance is essential—and it’s vital to hold yourself, your company and the team leading the charge accountable for the results. Like any other area of a business, a social impact program’s effectiveness will rise and fall, and like any business unit, you will have to adjust and evaluate regularly. That’s OK!
Last year, we released the findings of our first DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) report. I’ll be honest—the baseline report showed we had a lot of work to do to match the perspectives and experiences of our global customer base. But now we have a starting point. This kind of transparency is essential to make the changes needed in our recruiting and retention efforts, and we have KPIs and metrics in place.
We are accountable to deliver on our DEI goals, as well as our impact goals. I believe it is integral to our business strategy to deliver great outcomes for our core customer, employee and investor constituencies. The community is bigger than just us; this is something we can all learn.
Justworks to Award $250,000 in High-Impact Grants to Non-Profits Working to Break Down Barriers to Entrepreneurship
Justworks, the HR software platform for small businesses, today announced it is planning to award $250,000 in high-impact grants to five non-profit organizations supporting underrepresented founders in getting their businesses off the ground. Last year, Justworks pledged to donate 1% of the company’s equity and profits to create more equitable access to entrepreneurship through Justworks.org—joining other influential tech companies in the Pledge 1% movement, which inspires, educates, and empowers every entrepreneur, company, and employee to be a force for good. This first tranche of grantmaking is Justworks’ first foray into its 1% pledge.
About the Grant Program
For nearly a decade, Justworks has worked to make starting and running a business in America more accessible for all through its all-in-one software platform, which provides founders and their teams with access to benefits, payroll, HR, and compliance support.
However, many entrepreneurs also face unfair barriers to their success. Disparities in opportunity along race, gender, sexual orientation, and other socioeconomic lines, for example, can make access to funding, resources, and other fundamentals of entrepreneurship a major obstacle for underrepresented founders in realizing their potential.
Through $50,000 grants to five existing non-profits that support underrepresented founders in accessing the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, Justworks.org aims to increase the company’s impact in the minority- and women-owned business (MWBE) community, learn from organizations already having a positive impact in the space, and chart a course to scale its social impact moving forward.
“Justworks is lucky to have many amazing minority- and women-owned businesses (MWBEs) on our platform today. Our customers have taken on perhaps the biggest challenge in their lifetime and are looking for a partner they can trust,” said Yrthya Dinzey-Flores, Vice President of DEI, Social Impact, and Sustainability at Justworks. “We are proud to be a part of their story, but we also recognize that underrepresented founders face unique challenges beyond our platform. While we don’t have all the answers, we believe our close relationship with them—through our software and our service—puts us in a unique position to co-create solutions with organizations that are already active in supporting the MWBE community.”
How Nonprofits can Apply
After a month-long submission period, five U.S.-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations will be selected to receive a grant of $50,000 to support their existing work with underrepresented founders. The call for proposals will remain open from Tuesday, May 3, 2022 to Friday, May 27, 2022. Interested non-profit organizations can learn more and apply for a grant here.
In addition to providing them with financial support to realize their mission, Justworks aims to develop long-term relationships with organizations that know the MWBE ecosystem better than anyone. Justworks.org builds on several of Justworks’ existing initiatives aimed at supporting its non-profit customers, like the Spring Forward Fund, as well as its work to make its platform more accessible for its MWBE customers through its Just Thrive program.
About Justworks
Justworks is a cloud-based software platform that gives small and medium-sized businesses access to benefits, payroll, human resources and compliance support—all in one place. We drive economies of scale via co-employment, enabling attractive cost savings for our customers, and providing them a richer suite of benefits for their employees. We believe we are the first provider to combine this powerful demand aggregation dynamic with a simple, intuitive user experience and 24/7 expert support—enabling entrepreneurs and businesses to grow with confidence. To learn more, visit Justworks.com, follow us on Twitter @Justworks and Instagram @Justworks_HR.