Based in Arlington, Va., NAMI, the United States’ largest grassroots mental health organization, has independent affiliates throughout the nation. Their mission is to provide advocacy, education, support and public awareness so that all individuals and families affected by mental illness can build better lives. It’s a mission PagerDuty proudly supports. They offer multiple programs, including free education and support groups led by those with lived experience with mental health issues. 

A key service and common first point of contact is NAMI’s HelpLine. The nationwide peer-support service provides information, resource referrals and support to people living with a mental health condition, their family members and caregivers, mental health providers and the public. The HelpLine is largely staffed by volunteers who answer questions, offer support and provide practical next steps. In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HelpLine was overwhelmed and stretched to its limit. 

Pandemic Increases Need For NAMI’s Services 

The pandemic sparked a huge increase in the need for NAMI’s resources and support. According to The World Health Organization, the global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a massive 25 percent during the first two years of the pandemic. 

At the same time, NAMI saw its HelpLine inquiries skyrocket. “In May of 2020, HelpLine calls went up more than 50 percent,” said Jessica Edwards, Chief Development Officer at NAMI. “The demand increased for our virtual support groups, our HelpLine, our resources online. Everything increased in a very dramatic way because people were really struggling,” Edwards said. 

The surge didn’t stop after that first month or even that year. The need for NAMI’s services became more crucial, especially as talking openly about mental health conditions became more accepted by society at large. “One of the only bright spots of the pandemic was that mental health finally got the attention that it really needed, because it was more comfortable for people to say they were not OK,” Edwards said.

PagerDuty’s Impact Pricing Allows NAMI to Expand Services 

NAMI needed a way to scale and meet this growing demand for the HelpLine. When they were introduced to PagerDuty and learned about Impact Pricing for nonprofit customers, NAMI found a way to solve its technology needs, giving the HelpLine a much-needed boost. The ability to streamline their on-call schedule and simplify how volunteers were made aware of a crisis call allowed NAMI to scale for the increased demand for the HelpLine.  

With the support of PagerDuty, NAMI was able to add 40 new HelpLine volunteers and several new full-time staff. “We’re now able to keep pace with necessary capacity for volunteer support, as well as expand our offerings,” Edwards said. “More people are calling the HelpLine,” she added. “More people are wanting guidance and information. So, the more we’re able to leverage technology like PagerDuty to have more volunteers, the more people we can help.”

Partnering With PagerDuty to Provide More Support

Eliminating the stigma of mental health and steering the public conversation around resources and support is the main focus for NAMI. With help from PagerDuty, they plan to expand services, such as increasing the number of bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking HelpLine volunteers and interns. This gives more access to services to more people in need. 

“PagerDuty is a company and an organization that is authentic in leveraging technology for social change and social good,” Edwards said. “They really make a change and make a difference. And in our social impact world, these are the kinds of companies that NAMI loves to work and partner with.”

Learn more about PagerDuty’s Impact Pricing and see how we help nonprofits accelerate their work and reach. Get started now with our free 14-day trial.

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Our commitment to both social impact work and our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes is shared by both the company’s leadership and employees. As we have advanced our ESG programs and investments, laying the groundwork for new commitments and continued progress in the year ahead, this work gives PagerDuty a new avenue to create value for our customers and other stakeholders in pursuit of our shared societal and environmental goals. 

In 2017, we committed  to Pledge 1%, a corporate philanthropy movement dedicated to making the larger community a key stakeholder in every business. For us, that meant donating 1% of equity, 1% of product, and 1% of employee time to give back. 

Our commitment drove the launch of PagerDuty.org five years ago, the company’s social impact arm, which works to empower mission-driven teams to build a more equitable world and sustainable future. PagerDuty.org applies an integrated approach that mobilizes our technology platform, philanthropic investments, people, and voice to amplify the work of social impact organizations. Our early intention was to “empower those working to make a difference in the world and to use our technology to solve intractable challenges,” and through experimentation, iteration, and scaling of our programs, we’ve realized this vision. 

We recognize that our company’s commitment to building a more equitable world and sustainable future is a continuous journey. Given the function’s fifth  anniversary, we are pausing to reflect on the journey and celebrate some of our key accomplishments over the last five years. 

Here are five key things we’ve learned during our first five years:

1) Institutionalize your vision (and impact): Building an equitable world is part of our corporate vision and has been integral to our company’s ethos. That’s why it made sense to make the Pledge 1% commitment early in our journey toward becoming a public company. 

2) Invest beyond the money: From the start, we dedicated the internal resourcing and expertise required to make this work successful, such as bringing on a senior-level leader from the beginning, establishing the PagerDuty.org Advisory Board to provide leadership and oversight to support our strategic vision, and establishing our CFO as the executive sponsor for our ESG work. 

3) Drive momentum through accountability and transparency: PagerDuty is in the business of operationalizing trust. You see that reflected in our reporting on our social impact outcomes less than two years into the program’s tenure, with the publication of our first ESG disclosures less than three years into the program.

This year, as part of our accountability to our internal and external stakeholders for  responsible business practices, we are also refreshing our materiality assessment, defining science-based targets, and laying out a climate action plan. 

4) Align the entire  business: Leveraging our greatest assets—our people, product, and business practices—is critical to maximizing impact. It’s this holistic framework that enables us to realize our company vision and provide holistic support to community partners and Impact Customers by solving complex social and environmental challenges. By aligning the entire business, we’re positioned to meet the evolving needs of all our stakeholders: our employees, customers, communities, investors, and the planet.

One example of our work to embed social impact across the entire employee lifecycle is our recent analysis with our People team which  shows an empirical positive correlation between volunteerism and employee retention and engagement.

5) Invest in social impact work and realize the far-reaching benefits: We spent the first five years building the foundation, experimenting and iterating, staying curious, and gathering relevant data to inform our future investments. We’re building deeper partnerships with our social impact customers and diversifying our philanthropic investments through creative capital mechanisms like mission-related and impact investments. Additionally, we support PagerDuty’s employee acquisition and retention strategy with integrated programs that drive an impact mindset and inspire employees to take action.

Our customers and communities are central to everything we do at PagerDuty. PagerDuty.org’s partnership model mobilizes our product, people, funding, and voice to help nonprofits and mission-driven organizations accelerate their vital work. A few highlights from our partners include:  

• We support The Trevor Project in keeping their suicide hotline running 24/7, ensuring fewer interruptions to their suicide-prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth. 

• We partnered with SIRUM to prioritize critical work, connecting people with surplus life-saving medications by helping organizations like nursing homes, pharmacies, and manufacturers donate their unused medicine and get it to where it’s needed most. 

• PagerDuty’s technology, unrestricted grant funding, and pro bono technical expertise help ensure that Trek Medics International deploys emergency responders in underserved communities around the world. 

“As a nonprofit organization, we’re counting our pennies every day and we are dependent on the generosity of others,” said Jason Friesen, Founder and Executive Director at Trek Medics International. “We have to watch our budget very closely. PagerDuty’s holistic support makes it totally possible for us to work at full capacity without having to make any trade-offs or compromise any of our services.”

At PagerDuty, we view addressing our environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) risks and opportunities as fundamental to practicing business responsibly and creating value for all stakeholders, and we continue to set meaningful and measurable goals and to integrate ESG activities into our business strategy. We’ve made strong progress in the past five years, and we will continue to hold ourselves accountable to deliver value across our stakeholders as we forge ahead in this next half of our first decade. 

The post Five Years of Social Impact: A Look Back (and Ahead) at Progress Against Our Pledge 1% Commitments appeared first on PagerDuty.

At PagerDuty, our Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders and regional community social impact leads help drive collective impact across the company by supporting our impact customers and community partners. Since 2019, we’ve provided resources to these leaders to build regional, community-centered partnerships and engage PagerDuty employees (colloquially referred to as Dutonians) in meaningful opportunities to give back to their communities. In 2022, we formalized this program by earmarking $60,000 from our donor-advised fund for these social impact leaders to allocate as community grants. To support partner selection in line with our equity framework and grantmaking practices, we designed and led trainings, tools and templates. By the end of the year, 85% of our social impact leaders had allocated funds to 12 organizations globally by applying a partner-centered approach rooted in our cultural value of championing the customer, which emphasizes putting users first and making it easy for them to partner with us. 

Sharing decision-making power to further equity  

The PagerDuty.org Fund is funded by our Pledge 1% equity commitment and Dutonians across the globe contribute to the value of our impact fund by driving our company’s success. Empowering them to have a say in how and where philanthropic dollars are directed is one of the ways we practice equity and power-sharing in our philanthropy work. We partnered closely with PagerDuty’s Inclusion, Diversity and Equity (ID&E) team to build this program. “By enabling our ERG leaders with the agency to establish long-term partnerships with organizations that support the demographic they serve, we help expand the scope of impact and their motivation to incite meaningful change. This program embodies our cultural value to #TakeTheLead by increasing access to corporate resources for our emerging leaders,” said Carmel Ulbrick, Senior ID&E Program Manager at PagerDuty. 

Spotlighting our community partners 

Last year, Dutonian social impact leaders helped distribute funds to 12 organizations through this program with some positive early results. One of the partners funded through the program is Kids in Tech, whose mission is to excite, educate, and empower kids from low-income households to be leaders in the 21st century innovation economy. “With PagerDuty’s support, we were able to invest in building our resources to expand the number of kids we reach with our programming by 60%,” said Olu Ibrahim, Founder and CEO at Kids in Tech.

The impact of our community grant program has also been felt by our social impact leaders. “Alongside my Atlanta colleagues and RiSE ERG members, I am passionate about serving our local community through youth mentorship. With PagerDuty’s grant, our community partner Empowr can launch mentorship programs and buy necessary supplies to teach Atlanta’s Black and Latine high schoolers coding. In addition to grant funding, Dutonians aim to regularly volunteer with the Empowr team and students this year to help further their impact,” said Mya King, who co-leads RiSE, our ERG that supports PagerDuty’s Black employees.

“PatriotDuty is committed to supporting the veteran community and recognizes the valuable skills and experience they bring to the workforce. We’re partnering with Hire Heroes USA to help veterans successfully transition into civilian careers. Our partnership will assist 16,000 veterans in transitioning into the workforce with an average starting salary of $60,000 and support them with career advice, training, coaching and mentoring,” said Donavon Roberson, who co-leads PatriotDuty, our ERG that supports veterans.

What’s next for our community grantmaking program

At PagerDuty, we continuously work to foster a culture of changemakers where employees can thrive, grow and positively impact their communities. The community grantmaking program is an innovative benefit we offer social impact leaders across the company to engage their teams and expand a social impact mindset across the business. As we continue to invest in PagerDuty’s social impact leaders and our community partnerships, we are building additional tools and training for our leaders to begin tracking the intended impact of the community grants. Transparent learning and open sourcing tools is integral to our impact approach. As part of this commitment to ongoing learning, we will share our training materials and process through the peer communities that we are a part of, including the Pledge 1% and Impact Cloud communities. 

Learn more about broader impact work through our recently published annual Impact Report and learn more about each of the organizations funded through this community grantmaking program by clicking on the logos below.

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Our report describes the work we’ve done over the past year to advance social impact and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) through our levers of change—the actions we take or assets we leverage to effect or influence positive systemic change— across all our stakeholders. It contains critical data and metrics from our cross-functional Social Impact team, including our ESG disclosures. In it, we shine a spotlight on some of the mission-critical organizations that benefit from our affordable product access and investments in our key areas of Time-Critical Health and Climate Equity. We also highlight Dutonian Changemakers—a few of the many employees who embody our commitment to social impact through their actions and efforts.

Read the full PagerDuty Fiscal Year 2023 Social Impact Report, published today.

How we seek to build an equitable world and sustainable future

Our approach to social impact continues to evolve to maximize our ability to influence positive systemic change. We apply a “levers of change” framework that guides how we accelerate outcomes for all stakeholders, including our employees, customers, communities, investors, and the planet. These levers—our products, philanthropic funding, employee expertise, planetary commitments, and responsible business practices—help us realize our vision for a more equitable world and sustainable future. 

Below, I break down what each lever means, and highlight some of the successes we’ve achieved under each in the last year.

1. Our products: We deploy PagerDuty’s platform to support nonprofits, B Corps, and higher education organizations in delivering on their mission-critical work.

• We enhanced our Impact Pricing offering to nonprofits and B Corps to provide increased product discounts (40% discount on all products and services beyond the initial 5 free licenses), and expanded eligibility to include higher education institutions, resulting in a 67% increase in new applicants.
• We served 306 Impact Customers through our Impact Pricing offering.

“Too often, corporations that offer free or discounted services to nonprofits end their engagement with NGOs after they have provided the licensing. PagerDuty has taken the time to ensure that those who benefit from their impact programs are truly positioned for success.”— Chris Hillis (he/him), Co-Founder, Information Technology Disaster Resource Center

2. Philanthropic investments: We’re mobilizing our funding, product, people, and voice to meet our partners’ needs.

• We deployed $1.25M in our two portfolio areas of Time-Critical Health and Climate Equity. 
• We provided $1.2M in product discounts and product donations to impact organizations.
• We launched the PagerDuty Impact Accelerator, providing $800,000 in unrestricted funding to four tech-forward organizations, along with product credits and discounts, technical pro bono support, and voice amplification. 
• 90% of our philanthropic investments support organizations led by a woman or a non-majority leader.

“PagerDuty is a valuable funder and partner, willing to design programs with us specifically in mind. We are a software company building tech for good, and as our tech stack becomes bigger and more complicated, solutions like PagerDuty become more important. PagerDuty allows us to prioritize and identify potential issues quickly, so that we can focus on the things most important to our users.”— Kiah Williams (she/her), Co-Founder, SIRUM

3. Our people: We are building a culture of changemakers, where employees can thrive, grow, and positively impact their communities. 

• We reached parity in global gender pay equity, and improved pay equity for our U.S.-based underrepresented population to within one cent ($0.99 to $1.00). 
• Our Board is diverse in both gender and race/ethnicity, with 44% of our Board identifying as women and 67% identifying as racially diverse. 
• 95% of global employees volunteered or donated to a cause.
• 90% of employees cited PagerDuty’s social impact work as making them proud to work for the company.

“Social impact is a big part of why I joined PagerDuty. Being able to work somewhere I can grow in my career and give back to my community makes me proud to work at PagerDuty. Social impact and inclusion is at the core of our culture and PagerDuty.org makes it easy for every employee to be aware of and contribute to great causes.” — Kent Chao (he/him), VP, Finance

4. Planet stewardship: We are working across our value chain to help create an inclusive, low-carbon economy.

• We completed four years’ worth of carbon footprints, with expanded analyses of our value-chain emissions for FY22 and FY23. 
• We will submit science-based climate targets in FY24 with a plan to address these reduction focus areas: workplace, data center providers, business travel, and value-chain emissions.

5. Responsible business practices: We’re institutionalizing ESG into how we operate as a company.

• We improved or maintained strong ESG ratings, including EcoVadis Silver for the second year in a row and top 25% in the tech industry for our inaugural S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment.
• We appointed our first Chief Information Security Officer to oversee our data privacy, security, and ethics. 

What’s next

We’ve made great progress around our social impact goals, but we know there is always more work to do. In the next year, we plan to:

• Perform a double materiality assessment to reevaluate and recommit to our ESG priority focus areas.
• Submit science-based climate targets and develop a cross-discipline climate action plan to support the global need to limit warming to 1.5°C, as laid out by the Paris Agreement.
• Launch an inaugural corporate match program that will match employee philanthropic donations.

PagerDuty views its social and environmental risks and opportunities as fundamental to practicing business responsibility and creating value for all stakeholders. Integrating Social Impact and sustainability policies and practices, and ESG metrics, into each business function is key to our leadership as a purpose-driven company.

Read the full PagerDuty Fiscal Year 2023 Social Impact Report.

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Climate change is the most urgent and complex challenge we face as a global collective. This is important from an equity perspective as the consequences of climate change disproportionately affect economically and socially marginalized communities around the world. These communities typically contribute the least to the causes of climate change yet are rarely consulted, invested in, or trusted to build solutions that put them at the center of healing and thriving. Community solutions are critical but they are not enough. For businesses, proactively engaging in solutions to an endangered planet is critical for long-term value creation. As the environmentalist and mountaineer David Brower said, “There is no business to be done on a dead planet.”  

Learnings and Funding Principles 

With the imperative to support climate equity in mind, we’ve spent the last year immersed in a deep learning journey. We began this work last winter with the objective to show up as a funder with curiosity and humility — our goal was to listen, learn, and follow the needs of the sector and its leaders. We made an initial investment of $250,000 in four climate equity organizations in February 2022. Some of our salient learnings from our partnership with these organizations and other climate leaders include: 

• Only 2% of global philanthropic giving goes to climate equity and less than 1% of giving is directed to community-led groups. We share these numbers — a dismal reflection of where and how funding is directed — to bring attention to this acute funding gap and galvanize more funding and resources for solutions.
• To succeed in the long-term, climate solutions need to center on the communities most impacted by climate change. 
• For corporate funders, authentically engaging in climate equity work is an inside and outside job. In other words, funding community efforts is good but not enough; we also have to think about our contributions holistically, including how our business practices may contribute to unintended negative outcomes. We cannot perpetuate a system of harm and use philanthropy to alleviate its symptoms.

Informed by our partnerships, conversations, and learnings, we developed four funding principles to guide our climate equity philanthropy going forward: 

1. Our funding is most impactful when it fills gaps. We will continue to prioritize organizations led by people of color and women; geographies facing the brunt of climate change; and climate solutions that center frontline communities and their leaders. 
2. Continued learning and engagement are key to building credibility as a funder, and eventually a leader, in the climate equity space. We seek mutual learnings and open-source what we learn to benefit others. 
3. We will seek to build a diversified portfolio with a mix of direct funding to frontline organizations and funding through intermediaries. 
4. We will utilize philanthropic capital across the full spectrum, including mission-related investments, program-related investments, and impact investments. Diversifying how we deploy capital helps us support social impact innovators and leaders with the type of funding that is most valuable for their impact and business model. 

New Partnerships

In line with these guiding principles, we’re thrilled to announce partnerships with two phenomenal organizations that are bringing community-built climate solutions to life. These organizations will receive the full spectrum of PagerDuty support, including unrestricted grant funding, skills-based volunteering, access to PagerDuty’s Operations Cloud platform, and voice amplification. We invite you to learn more about these organizations and their impact:

Navajo Power Home: Navajo Power Home provides solar services to off-grid homes on the Navajo Nation – an area that covers 27,000+ square miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. One third of homes on the Navajo Nation do not have access to reliable electricity and Navajo Power Home is changing that by providing full-service solar electricity. This investment would influence the 0.3% of climate funding received by Indigenous-people led organizations and would help Navajo Power Home bring affordable and clean electricity to 10,000+ homes by 2030. 

“While growing up on Navajo Nation without electricity has put so many families in the dark since day one, with solar power we now know the means to utilize our electrical appliances, have our kids do their homework, and keep our food refrigerated. That makes life easier here on Navajo Nation.” – Jerry Williams, General Manager at Navajo Power Home. 

Beneficial Returns: Beneficial Returns provides loans to social impact entrepreneurs in Latin America and South East Asia to build climate resilient solutions to challenges faced by their communities. Their portfolio includes social enterprises that support indigenous farmers in Ecuador, develop clean water technology in Indonesia, and bring solar power to homes in Mexico. We’re investing in Beneficial Returns through a combination of a mission-related investment loan that will be returned to the PagerDuty.org impact fund over seven years and a small grant for general operating costs. This creative capital arrangement enables Beneficial Returns to support social entrepreneurs in geographies disproportionately impacted by climate change while supporting our learning journey with full-spectrum social finance. 

What’s next for PagerDuty’s climate equity journey?

This is just the beginning of our climate equity philanthropy work. In 2023, we will continue to support community-led efforts and technology solutions in climate equity. We are planning our first-ever annual partner convening to bring our partners together with a wholly partner-led agenda. Our goal is to connect our partners to resources and networks they need to amplify their impact. In addition to our philanthropic efforts, we are committed to climate solutions from a business perspective to mitigate our unintended negative outcomes. Our priorities in 2023 include establishing climate commitments in line with the Paris Accord by establishing near-term climate targets through the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), and developing strong environmental policies for our workplaces, information systems, finance, and other critical business areas. 

We will continue to share our progress and learnings with Dutonians, partners, corporate social impact peers, and investors.

The post PagerDuty’s Climate Equity Journey: Learnings, Partnerships, and What’s Next appeared first on PagerDuty.

This volunteer opportunity is dedicated in memory of Phylicia Jones (PJ). We will miss you. Thanks for always volunteering and giving back with PagerDuty.

In October, more than 20 Dutonains came together in San Francisco to assemble 50+ hygiene kits for Compass Family Services. Families in San Francisco have been particularly impacted by COVID-19 and other economic changes in the area over the last few years, necessitating organizations like Compass Family Services to help those “who are at risk to become stably housed, emotionally and physically healthy, and economically self-sufficient.” Providing hygiene kits to homeless families provides a person with dignity. More than 150 kits have been donated by Bay Area Dutonians in 2022, supported by volunteer donations as team members live the company values #Ack&Own and #RunTogether. 

Using company awards and donating funds, Dutonians rallied together to raise $500+ for one of the first in-person San Francisco volunteering opportunities since returning to the office in 2021. We successfully campaigned, bought, and assembled the following kits this quarter: shampoo, conditioner, body wash, soap, socks, masks, washcloth, toothbrush, and toothpaste. 

We aim to keep this volunteer opportunity going for the rest of FY23 in the San Francisco office. This will allow us to donate kits in the future for other local populations.

Stats for the campaign thus far:

• Assembled 50+ hygiene kits this quarter
• 450+ items were used to assemble the kits this quarter; Overall we utilized 1,350 items to make a total of 150 kits in 2022
• Donations: $500+
• In-person volunteers: 20+
• Volunteer hours: 40+

Special thanks to all of our SF volunteers and Dutonians who made a financial donation to this volunteer opportunity. A big thanks to Kandace Bona and the crew who organized a party with treats.

Here are a few snaps of our volunteer opportunity from the San Francisco office:

The post PagerDuty Giving Back to the Community: Helping Unhoused Families Find Dignity with Hygiene Kits appeared first on PagerDuty.

We first connected with Code the Dream through our vaccine equity funding round in 2021. Code the Dream received an unrestricted grant from PagerDuty.org to scale Vamos Outreach, a mobile and desktop app that assists outreach workers in supporting migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States. Migrant and seasonal farm workers are essential to the U.S. economy and food production, making up an estimated 73% of agriculture workers in the U.S. However, they’ve been at a heightened risk of COVID-19 outbreaks and lack access to vaccines and culturally resonant information about the vaccines. Over the past year, Code the Dream has updated features and scaled the Vamos app to six states across the U.S. helping farmwork outreach workers share critical information about vaccines with farm workers and creating more paid apprenticeships for Code the Dream students. 

Beyond the check and beyond the grant 

We seek to shift power to our partners by anchoring our support trust-based practices and a full-spectrum approach. This means that we engage in frequent and ongoing conversations to find creative ways to support the needs of our partners. For Code the Dream, this meant initiating an open dialogue to understand Code the Dream’s needs and connecting their team with PagerDuty employees to volunteer as mentors to their students. Through our support for their vaccine equity work, we elevated Code the Dream leaders at major PagerDuty events such as our annual company kickoff and product development conference. PagerDuty employees created “bite-sized” career advice videos to answer Code the Dream students’ questions on acing job interviews, crafting the perfect resume, building technical problem solving skills and confidence, asking for a raise, and navigating a job in corporate tech. Says Daisy Magnus-Aryitey, co-executive director, about our partnership. “PagerDuty’s support has enabled our apprentices to update our Vamos app, which many organizations have used to reach migrant farmworkers to provide access to COVID-19 vaccines. Our students have been motivated with the guidance and advice from PagerDuty volunteers. With this kind of multi-dimensional support, we are closer to Code the Dream’s vision of a world in which tech innovation comes from all of us and benefits all of us.”

Over the past year, as PagerDuty’s partnership with Code the Dream has deepened from grant funding to pro bono volunteerism to brand elevation, we’ve evolved from an initial focus on vaccine equity to a broader partnership to support Code the Dream’s goals. While our grant period is complete, PagerDuty employees continue to volunteer as mentors for Code the Dream SKILL-IT program which supports people looking to pivot careers or build on existing coding, web, and app development skills. As part of this program, PagerDuty employees have hosted monthly sessions on tech topics like navigating imposter syndrome in corporate tech, finding your way in new workplaces, and the best career advice ever received.

PagerDuty employees equally benefit from our volunteer partnership. They’ve been inspired to learn about the Code the Dream students’ journeys and continue to give back because they are committed to diversifying the technology industry to influence how technology is built. Solomon Tolosa, a software engineer at PagerDuty, has been volunteering as a mentor for Code the Dream and said, “I connected with a lot of students juggling full or part-time work, raising their families, and studying. Having a good mentor can be a game changer and make a huge difference in a student’s efforts to launch their career in the tech industry. I’m grateful to Code the Dream for giving me the opportunity to be a part of their students’ journeys.”

It takes a village 

Code the Dream is on a mission to provide a path to a life-changing career in tech for young people from diverse backgrounds and low-resourced communities, impacting not only the lives of the students but also their communities. Help a student from an underrepresented background become a software developer this Giving Tuesday by:

1. Giving Your Time: Code the Dream succeeds because of their volunteers. You can learn more about available volunteer opportunities and sign up at Code the Dream’s website.
2. Making a Donation: Each $50 donation helps Code the Dream connect one student with one hour of mentorship with a professional developer.

The post Centering Partnerships in Trust and Full-Spectrum Support: A Story from Code the Dream appeared first on PagerDuty.

Based on these learnings, partner conversations, and our continued commitment to mobilize our resources for good, we are launching our newest funding program — Impact Labs. The goal of Impact Labs is to help tech-forward organizations in our focus areas of time-critical health and climate equity amplify their impact with full-spectrum support — providing unrestricted funding, product credits and discounts, technical pro bono support, story telling, and voice amplification to four organizations over a 24-month period.

Practicing trust-based philanthropy 

At PagerDuty.org, we have been on a journey to embody trust-based practices across all of our work to guide how we build nurturing, transparent relationships and share power with our partners. We understand that mission-driven organizations are the experts because they are the most proximate to, and therefore best positioned to solve, the challenges they are focused on. We view our role as an amplifier and seek to design programs that center around the needs of our social impact partners. 

We designed Impact Labs with an eye toward transparency and equity by sharing our selection criteria with interested organizations and structuring our outreach and discovery process to lessen the fundraising burden for our partners. To ensure diverse perspectives were considered, shortlisted organizations were reviewed by a PagerDuty Advisory Council comprising PagerDuty.org team members as well as teammates from across the company. 

Impact Labs partners 

Today, I’m delighted to announce our inaugural cohort of Impact Labs partners — an inspiring group of organizations with missions rooted in time-critical health and climate equity. Each of these organizations will receive $200,000 in unrestricted funding, product credits and discounts, technical pro bono support, and storytelling and voice amplification over the next 24 months. These organizations and their leaders represent our commitment to bring a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens to our philanthropic giving and channel funds where there are massive funding gaps. For example, 58% of BIPOC-led organizations received corporate funding in 2021, compared with 71% of white-led organizations. Further, there is a $2.7 billion funding gap between BIPOC-led and white-led environmental organizations. 

We are excited to embark on a long-term partnership with our new Impact Labs partners. 

Intelehealth connects last-mile communities with uninterrupted healthcare by providing telemedicine software and digital infrastructure to government health facilities and nongovernmental organizations that provide healthcare in low and middle income countries. Intelehealth’s current work is focused on India and Kyrgyzstan, and they are expanding to additional low- and middle-income countries. Participating in Impact Labs will enable Intelehealth to improve their platform on scalability, usability and user experience, data use, clinical decision support, interoperability, privacy, and security. 

NAMI is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health advocacy organization and the NAMI HelpLine is a cornerstone of their work, touching 100,000 lives every year. NAMI’s programs reach people across the United States through 600 local Affiliates and 49 State Organizations. NAMI recently onboarded as a PagerDuty.org impact customer to enhance their incident notification workflows as they scale their HelpLine. Participating in Impact Labs will help NAMI develop culturally resonant Spanish translations of Helpline resources, recruit volunteers for Spanish HelpLine support, and expand HelpLine hours by an additional 24 hours/week. 

Replate is reducing food waste, a major contributor to climate change, by leveraging technology, and improving access to nutritious food by redistributing surplus food to community organizations that serve people experiencing food insecurity. Replate has programs across the United States and Canada. Participating in Impact Labs will enable Replate to scale their impact by expanding their network of food donor businesses and integrating onto the PagerDuty platform to synchronize data across their digital systems to conduct more seamless food recovery. 

Sibel Health has developed and is scaling an FDA-cleared wearable monitoring tool to reduce health inequities and drive improved outcomes for pregnant people and premature neonates by helping medical staff identify and address drivers of maternal and neonatal mortality. Sibel implements programs in 24 countries globally. Participating in Impact Labs will enable Sibel to augment their monitoring tool with additional telehealth features to better serve both underserved populations in the U.S. and low- and middle-income countries. By onboarding onto the PagerDuty platform, they envision using our technology to help triage lower acuity technical failures with critical outputs that require immediate clinical attention. 

Tracking progress

In the spirit of our trust-based practice, we asked each organization to share organizational metrics that they will track for the duration of the Impact Labs program. In addition to each organization’s self-defined metrics, we will hold ourselves accountable to delivering value through Impact Labs by measuring successful onboarding onto the PagerDuty platform, partner engagement and satisfaction, mid-point technical “health checks”, and publishing partner stories. 

As we continue on this journey, we will share our learnings and spotlight our partners and the incredible work they are doing to make this world more equitable.

The post PagerDuty Launches Impact Labs; Deploys $800K in Funding to Advance Time-Critical Health and Climate Equity Outcomes appeared first on PagerDuty.

A key insight of our initial work in climate equity is that as a technology company, an important (and often overlooked) way to add value is by showing up with humility, listening, and investing in systems change. We are also committed to sharing our learnings with others so that we can build on each other’s work in a generative, rather than duplicative—or even extractive—way. 

We are excited to share this conversation with The Solutions Project, one of our climate equity grant partners. We spoke with Sarah Shanley Hope, Vice President of Narrative Strategies, to learn more about why we need an equity lens to mitigate the climate crisis and how supporting grassroots movements and leaders is an important way to drive change. 

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Sarah, can you tell us one thing that people who aren’t familiar with The Solutions Project should know about the work you do?

Our purpose is to fund and popularize climate justice solutions that are rooted in the communities that are at the front lines of the climate crisis. These are largely communities of color—Black, Indigenous, immigrant, AAPI, Latinx—communities that have been experiencing the worst of pollution and the climate crisis for decades. We know that those who are closest to the problems are also the first to find solutions. This is why we, The Solutions Project, exist—we see our role as supporting grassroots organizations in the United States and Puerto Rico on the frontlines of the climate crisis by providing grants and media training, and serving as a platform to amplify the voices of community leaders.  

For those of us who may be new to the climate equity space, can you tell us what climate equity means  and why it’s important? 

I think it’s important to name what the dominant climate and environmental lens is because that’s what needs to be disrupted. The dominant lens is that climate change is strictly about greenhouse gas emissions. There are three reasons to expand this very singular lens to a more integrated one of climate and equity.  

First, if we actually want to achieve emission reductions at the scale and speed that the science tells us we need to, then we have to look at who’s creating the most scalable solutions. An amazing organization that we work with, Native Renewables, is a perfect example among hundreds of others I could share. They have built affordable off-grid solar photovoltaic systems for Navajo and Hopi families living without electricity and primarily using diesel generators, today. Now, the challenge is how we take what they’ve created and help them scale it, because there are millions of households in the rural United States and across the world that would benefit from this technology. So, the number one reason to integrate climate and equity is that this lens creates solutions that can be scaled and adopted in the vast majority of the global context. 

The second reason is about politics. We now have a diverse and younger voting and elected official demographic here in the United States. And, the political pathway to scaling green infrastructure is by addressing inequities and understanding the needs of “working class voters.” This group includes women, young people, and people of color who are feeling the impact of the climate crisis and are voting to push local and federal governments to fund green infrastructure, create good green jobs, ensure affordable housing and healthy places to live.  

The third reason is moral. We have to understand the history of which communities have borne the brunt of our dirty energy economy over centuries; this is key to building a just transition to a green economy. 

What does it mean to show up as a trust-based funder? How do you measure and evaluate your impact? 

People who are passionate about climate change usually start by asking themselves, “What can I do?” We shift that approach to ask: “Who am I with?” Then, “What can we do together? Or “What’s already happening that I can support?” 

When The Solutions Project was founded, we had a simple goal—100% renewable energy for 100% of the people. Very early on, we recognized that social change happens by rooting in ground-up movements for change. An idea like 100% renewable energy has actual meaning in the neighborhood organizations that meet the needs of their communities for healthy air, affordable utilities, and reliable infrastructure. From our earliest days, our grantmaking has brought dollars into these grassroots organizations. We trust that communities that are closest to the problem are going to be the first to the solution, and what they need are true partners who can respond to their requests for more momentum, money, and media attention for their successes. 

Under the leadership of our CEO/ED,Gloria Walton, who came to the organization following decades building power in frontline communities, The Solutions Project now aspires to solidarity philanthropy. The difference between solidarity and trust is that solidarity involves showing up and mobilizing resources, co-creating, and sharing power with our partners. Solidarity comes through relationships that build trust. 

So this gets to the impact measurement question. The status quo in philanthropy is laborious reports that require hours and hours of work. Funders ask for proof of every cent spent and the impact it achieved. Trust-based philanthropy takes away the laboriousness but it’s the same process: “Here’s an application, here’s a report format. Make the case for your work.” Instead of taking 20 hours, it takes five. Solidarity puts the onus on us. We spend our resources building media capacity for our grantees because what better indicator of impact and success than a Washington Post journalist deciding to write a story on a grantees’ success, for example. We also do an annual evaluation of ourselves through an independent evaluator to measure if we are effective, if we are doing what we say we are doing. 

In the midst of constant dire news on the climate crisis, what gives you hope?

The climate crisis can be really overwhelming. It can feel very doom and gloom. So another thing I want people to know about The Solutions Project is that we’re your folks if you want to find hope. I’m not talking about hope in a bottle. I’m talking about real gritty, powerful hope that comes from a relentless determination to figure out the best solutions for really complicated problems. And frontline communities, communities of color that face the compounding crises of climate, pollution, a dirty economy, racism—they’re not waiting for somebody to come in and save them. They are solving big, complex problems and their communities are where we find hope. 

Let me tell you a little more about Native Renewables so you have a clearer picture of their impact and hope “in action.” They bring solar power to families in Navajo and Hopi nations. The organization is founded and staffed by Navajo and Hopi people. Theircommunities have faced genocide, displacement, and continued disinvestment by the U.S. government; at least 15,000 homes Navajo homes have no electricity. Native Renewables founders Dr. Suzanne Singer and Wahleah Johns built an off-grid photovoltaic system right-sized from a cost perspective to replace what Native families were paying for diesel fuel to power generators. Their team has installed more than 100 kilowatts, bringing clean electricity to dozens of homes. The organization also built a workforce development program that provides Navajo and Hopi people with training and skill building needed to install and maintain the off-grid photovoltaic systems. This is just an incredible and hopeful example of what’s possible when communities have the resources to build solutions for themselves.

How can PagerDuty and peer tech companies best support you and the communities you serve?

Join us. No grant is too big or too small for The Solutions Project and our partners. I mentioned Native Renewables earlier. We know exactly how much those off-grid photovoltaic systems cost and what we need to scale them. Our partners have the solutions. They need the support to scale them. Our partners are hungry and ready for expanded support like marketing, design and communications expertise.  The longer-term opportunities lie in thinking through how we bring the best of Silicon Valley and these technologies in support of the climate justice movement through the practice of solidarity. We’re not talking about charity. We’re talking about rooting in trust, and it’s aspiring to show up in new and innovative ways. 

How do you and your partners think about the potential role technology can play in accelerating solutions?

I know there’s an actual match to be made between our two sectors, but I’m not sure how to go about it in a way that truly breaks the status quo. So I return to those questions: Who am I with? What can we do together? What’s already out there that we can complement and integrate with?  As a technologist, you have to ask “Am I willing to be influenced? Am I willing to collaborate?” True collaboration means balancing listening and telling. It means not being in denial about where your expertise really lies when your goal is to solve social injustices. 

As we build partnerships and explore how technology can help, the first thing we need is shared values. When we were first introduced to PagerDuty, it was your value system that most impressed us and made us feel like we can actually go on a journey together. 

Can you share 1-2 actions our readers can take to support TSP’s work and further the outcomes you are working toward?

Yes! Visit TheSolutionsProject.org or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter to learn more about climate justice solutions you can amplify or support. We also have a map of our grantees on the website that you can check out. As you consider your year-end giving, we hope you’ll find at least one new climate justice organization to donate to! 

The post Showing Up for Climate Equity Finds Hope: An Inspiring Conversation with The Solutions Project appeared first on PagerDuty.

As COVID-19 vaccines became available in early 2021, it was widely recognized that vaccine equity—equitable, safe, and trusted access to vaccines—was the only way to end the pandemic. This is why PagerDuty launched a $1M grant fund in 2021 to close the global vaccine equity gap and funded eight organizations working on vaccine equity, access, and distribution. 

A year into our partnership, here’s a spotlight on the work that one of our grantees, Mobile Pathways, led along with the Vaccine Equity Coalition to bring trusted vaccine information and access to under-documented and detained immigrant communities across the United States, with a particular focus on border areas and within ICE detention facilities. Immigrants are among the most marginalized communities in the world and the pandemic has hit them particularly hard. In the U.S., undocumented immigrant communities have often lacked access to vaccines and trusted information about them. 

Mobile Pathways, a pioneer for democratizing justice via technology, supports marginalized immigrants to navigate the complex maze of the U.S. immigration system through trusted mobile technology. As critical components of this support, Mobile Pathways focuses on two primary impact indicators—safety and preparedness. When the pandemic hit, it became clear that both safety and preparedness were especially relevant for marginalized communities impacted by COVID-19. Mobile Pathways formed a coalition of 26 immigration grassroots organizations to combat vaccine misinformation. 

As public health guidance shifted from lockdowns to vaccine distribution, the coalition knew that marginalized immigrants would face multiple hurdles gaining access to vaccines. To address these challenges, the vaccine equity coalition ensured that scientifically accurate and culturally resonant information about vaccines reached the most vulnerable communities. They partnered with local clinics, visited classrooms and workplaces, organized popup vaccine clinics, and set up hotlines accessible in ICE detention centers to combat misinformation and open up easy access to vaccines. 

Leading a coalition for equitable access

With the support of a PagerDuty.org grant, Mobile Pathways and the Vaccine Equity Coalition have provided accurate vaccine information to three times the number of people than their original goal. “Our coalition of nonprofits informed over 882,000 people about the COVID-19 vaccination via multiple outreach methods, far exceeding our original goal of 256,000. We’ve also vaccinated more than 25,000 people and provided testing kits or proctored tests, required for border crossing and access to shelters, to over 15,000 people. I’m truly floored by our stellar performance and grateful for all partners who made this impact possible,” said Bartlomiej Skorupa, Co-founder of Mobile Pathways. 

This outsized impact was never going to be easy, and it could have been particularly challenging with a diverse group of coalition members and stakeholders. Mobile Pathways played a critical leadership role in bringing together different stakeholders with shared interests, creating a safe space for collaboration and problem-solving, and fundraising. They recognized that with fast moving and often confusing information on COVID-19 variants, vaccine doses, and boosters, the coalition needed to proactively share and communicate with each other to ensure that they were keeping pace with official guidelines. Mobile Pathways set a target for the coalition to build an easy and mobile-friendly progress report that each member organization could fill out in five minutes or less—a goal that all of us funders should aspire to. The easy reporting enabled the coalition to be nimble in sharing findings and empowering coalition members to monitor and track progress on collective and individual goals. 

They have also set the standard in transparency and open-sourced learning by making the coalition’s monthly reflections and learnings calls available to the public. The direct support to the community that the coalition provided is evident from the impact stories shared during each call, like the story Freedom for Immigrants shared of an immigrant mother who was detained at the border and separated from her seven-year-old daughter for a year. Freedom for Immigrants runs a hotline, which the mom called; they were able to bond her out of detention, reunite her with her daughter, and provide them both with the resources to get COVID-19 vaccines. The coalition’s proactive communication was key in its prompt response to the opening of the U.S./Mexico border in November 2021. Crossing the border required proctored COVID-19 tests, a need the coalition partner Global Response Management quickly filled by administering thousands of tests per week so families could be reunited.

The key to the coalition’s success has been three-fold: “A big piece of our success is trust. We relied heavily on our partners’ expertise and networks to inform us of the strategies that will work in their communities. We also reflected regularly, with monthly meetings to share resources, strategies and learn from failures. Finally, our ‘Trust Yet Verify’ strategy helped our partners to digitally transform, enabling them to share and review weekly data, as well as identify trends and areas to improve,” shared Bart.    

What’s next?

The work to support immigrant and refugee communities is far from over. Mobile Pathways will continue to build coalitions with immigration advocates to expand its reach and provide more resources, especially in rural America. Mobile Pathways plans to expand nationally to meet the growing demand for their services and getting more immigration advocate partners involved in coalitions. Mobile Pathways has recently launched Hola Asistente—a free text-based immigration assistant for anyone in immigrant court. The app is powered by vetted immigration attorneys and provides detailed case information, tracks and alerts users about changes to their immigration case, and teaches them the basics of immigration law in multiple languages. 

According to Bart, the support of PagerDuty has been critical in efforts to reach immigrants and improve vaccine equity. “As we celebrate the amazing work of our vaccine coalition’s efforts, we know that our efforts made possible by PagerDuty will resound for decades to come. Like us, PagerDuty embraces the core value of ‘Listen First’. If you really want to team up, then you need to listen to what the other party is saying, always. I believe PagerDuty refers to this as “Run Together.” With the support of PagerDuty, we believe that we can create systemic change and better support the rights of all marginalized immigrants.” 

The work ahead for Mobile Pathways and their partners is not easy. Here’s how you can help them support immigrant communities gain equitable access to resources: 

• Share the stories of undocumented immigrants affected by COVID-19
• Learn how Hola Asistente helped Djamal win asylum. 
• Know someone who could benefit from Hola Asistente? Share the app with them. 

While you’re here, check out our 2021 Impact Report.

The post Mobile Pathways – Building Trust to Ensure Vaccine Equity appeared first on PagerDuty.