By Tommy Jarvis, FinancialForce4Good Council Chair

Here at FinancialForce, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the closing of our 2016 volunteerism efforts than to announce our formal commitment to the Pledge 1% community and their efforts to build a movement of corporate philanthropy.

From its inception in 2009, corporate social responsibility, and the philanthropic leadership of the 1/1/1 model led by Salesforce, has been a top priority for FinancialForce. This was viewed on day one when our co-founder and CEO Jeremy Roche initiated FinancialForce4Good, the philanthropic wing of FinancialForce. The vision of this initiative has always been rooted in the belief that we are stronger and more effective when we work together. Therefore, FinancialForce, via FinancialForce4Good, is committed to provide our employees and non-profit partners the resources to maximize the collective impact of their efforts.

Over the past seven years our work to address social causes in our communities and improve lives of others by harnessing the talents, passions, and generosity of FinancialForce employees, partners, and customers has grown tremendously. Whether it was collaborating with our closest partner Salesforce on a number of events (ranging from a National Park cleanup in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Wine to Waves Ride to benefit MS research, or processing food at the Central Texas Food Bank) or raising funds for some of our beneficiary NPO partners (ex. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in the US or St. Michael’s Hospice in the UK), we are committed to making a positive impact in our communities.

Recently FinancialForce has taken a number of exciting steps to ensure that we are maximizing that impact. First, we have formally “Taken the Pledge” to commit to giving at least 1% of our employee time for our community. This has long been a goal of ours, but we wanted to formalize this commitment via Pledge1Percent.org not only to celebrate our current efforts, but also to collaborate with other pledged members to grow our Pledge of 1% to equity, profit, and/or product in the future.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, FinancialForce4Good has put forth a new charter of our philanthropic efforts. Now, for the first time since its founding, FinancialForce4Good will be governed by a diverse group of employee volunteers. Tasked with maximizing the resources we provide our employees and partners to achieve the most impact, the Council took on the unique experiment to ask our employees directly where we should focus these efforts and we collectively selected Underserved Youth Education to focus the majority of our efforts.

In conclusion, it is an exciting time to be at FinancialForce and we are excited to leverage the continued leadership of the Pledge 1% corporate community and our partnership with Salesforce to achieve even greater philanthropic success in 2017.

Originally posted: November 30, 2016

By an Atlassian volunteer.

I have a son and a daughter attending public school in Sydney. As an Aussie transplant having grown up in Czechoslovakia, when I moved to Australia, I wanted to learn as much about the Australian education system as I could to try and understand how it is preparing my kids for life in the 21st century. And in my research I identified an important skill set that was missing from public education: computer science.

And I’m not the only person to notice the growing importance of technical skills in our world today. Technology has changed all of our lives at a fundamental level, and at a speed not seen by any other advancement before it. Tech companies have added billions to the economy, creating products that are used around the globe. These companies are shaping the future of how we live, work, and relate to each other.

But the reality is that our education system hasn’t really caught up to the break-neck speed of the technological changes we are experiencing. While computer science education is available on an individual basis through online classes and summer camps, it is only just becoming required curriculum at the national level. Schools realize the need to teach these skills, but they’re struggling to get started.

And then I thought of my workplace at Atlassian. As a technology company, we are literally bursting with computer science talent. I started to wonder what it would be like to bring the knowledge that we have to schools and teach kids the basics of computer science skills.

Teaming up for education

I started by rallying up my colleagues in the Sydney office who were passionate about this subject too, and we launched a grassroots program in concert with local Syndey schools. The response was astounding. In the first 24 hours of launching the program, over 7,000 kids from Sydney schools were signed up for the program. We realized we needed to quickly recruit other Atlassians in order to serve the needs of the schools and students clamoring for computer science classes.

With the help of the curriculum from CS first, we started sending Atlassian employees into schools for an hour a week over the course of 8 weeks to teach computer science. Because of Atlassian’s pledge to donate 1% of employee time to volunteering and community involvement, it was easy to find people who had the time and passion to volunteer in local schools. The kids loved the classes, and it’s been a very enriching experience for all of our Atlassian volunteers.

Teaming up with teachers

While we were teaching computer science to local Sydney school kids, we noticed that the teachers started to get interested in these topics, too. What began as a resistance to, or even fear of, technology, turned into knowledge and excitement from teachers who were presiding over these classrooms. It then dawned on us that by training up teachers, we could reach far more students with computer science education, and extend our impact far beyond the limits of the a single computer science classroom. Based on this, we started a training class for local Syndey teachers and we’ve now trained over 100 teachers in CS First.

It’s been so rewarding to see teachers who previously knew very little about computer science acquire their skills through our training and actually relish being able to teach computer science in their classrooms on their own. If you think about the impact of one teacher over the course of their career, they have the capacity to reach thousands and thousands of students with computer science education.