PagerDuty Launches Impact Labs; Deploys $800K in Funding to Advance Time-Critical Health and Climate Equity Outcomes
Since the PagerDuty.org Fund was established in 2019, PagerDuty.org has distributed more than $3M in funding to organizations working in the areas of time-critical health, just and equitable communities, and climate equity. Over the past few years, we’ve evolved our approach and deepened our partnerships through trust-based practices and providing multi-year, unrestricted funding. We’ve seen how we can unlock additional impact when we invest for the long-term and leverage company-wide assets including our product, technical support, and our brand and voice in addition to philanthropy. Consistent feedback from our partners is that unrestricted multi-year funding is the single most important thing we can do to empower them to prioritize impact and long-term investments in technology.
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.