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. 

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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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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.

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.

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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! 

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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the impact on underserved populations and the hardest-to-reach communities around the world compounds every day. With 84% of COVID-19 vaccinations being administered in high and upper-middle income countries, the majority of the world still does not have access to a vaccine. Vaccine availability, access, and trust has become critical to ensuring that everyone has the opportunity and relevant information to be vaccinated—including, and especially, those who have historically been economically or socially marginalized.

Vaccine distribution is incredibly complex, from temperature-controlled supply chain management and geographic allocations to appointment scheduling and data collection. PagerDuty’s digital operations management platform is built to handle real-time challenges like these. From orchestration across teams, supply and inventory management, and reliability across systems, to preventing and remediating extreme spikes in usage, PagerDuty is an essential tool to help create successful vaccine distribution and access.

Recognizing our platform’s immense potential to support the crucial and complex needs around vaccine distribution, we launched a $1 million USD open call for funding to ensure that COVID-19 vaccinations reach the most marginalized communities around the globe.

Photo Credit: Mobile Pathways

The goal of this funding round is to deliver more COVID-19 vaccines faster in the United States and globally—with a focus on underserved communities—and to help prepare communities and equip health systems to deploy and administer vaccines as they become globally available.

With a focus on equitable allocation and distribution, we focused our funding on two pathways to a solution:

1. Vaccine Access and Distribution: Through this funding pathway, we are investing in tech-centric nonprofit partners who leverage PagerDuty. These are organizations who work to expediently and inclusively increase COVID-19 vaccine willingness and access for individuals and communities globally. Partners in this pathway will receive unrestricted funding, product credits, and specialized technical volunteer support from PagerDuty employees.
2. Vaccine Equity: Through this funding pathway we’ve invested in nonprofit partners who are led by local leaders. These groups are leveraging community-based, peer-to-peer approaches to address vaccine hesitancy in their regions, and ensure equitable, safe access to vaccines in order to build trust, inclusion, and participation among marginalized communities in the United States and Canada. Partners in this pathway will receive unrestricted funding.

We are proud to announce the following recipients of our Equitable COVID-19 Vaccine Access and Distribution funding round.

Vaccine Access and Distribution Partners

CareMessage is a current PagerDuty customer using its patient engagement platform—the largest for underserved populations in the United States—to meet people where they are and help fulfill the critical healthcare needs of low-income, underserved communities. During the pandemic, CareMessage has helped address barriers throughout the vaccination process and build vaccine confidence through text message alerts. PagerDuty’s funding and product will enable the organization to expand its reach to one million underserved patients by making CareMessage’s tech-driven intervention available to additional community clinics.

“CareMessage’s infrastructure has enabled more than 10 million critical messages (and counting) around vaccine distribution and education via 250 healthcare provider partner organizations serving the most vulnerable Americans. Our ability to sustain this growing impact is directly tied to our use of PagerDuty’s solutions to monitor our infrastructure in real-time, providing the visibility and automation needed to proactively respond to issues and ensure patients receive the critical vaccine-related information they need.”
— Vineet Singal, Co-Founder and CEO

Turn.io is a social enterprise and current PagerDuty customer driving equitable access to healthcare. It does this by co-creating digital communication tools for nonprofit organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and resource-constrained health ministries in Africa, South-East Asia, and Latin America. Reaching over 20 million people globally, Turn.io will leverage PagerDuty to expand and launch tools that utilize familiar digital channels, including Whatsapp, to provide vulnerable, disempowered and minority communities with easy and secure access to vital COVID-19 information and vaccine appointments schedulers.

WeRobotics seeks to enable locally-led applications of drone technology to tackle last-mile COVID-19 testing, vaccine delivery, and essential medical supply challenges in hard-to-reach communities. They have previously enabled medical drone deliveries in Peru, Dominican Republic, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Ghana and Madagascar, amongst other countries. With PagerDuty’s support, the organization will work with public health partners and marginalized communities in the Tawi Tawi province of the Philippines to deliver vaccines and critical supplies more rapidly to those who need them the most.

Vaccine Equity Partners

Code Tenderloin, a long time PagerDuty partner, has become the primary COVID-19 support organization in the San Francisco Area. It serves those hardest hit by the pandemic, including the underserved, homeless, LGBTQ+, and ethnic communities. With PagerDuty’s support, Code Tenderloin will partner with UCSF and GLIDE to implement a new COVID-19 Vaccination Program. The program will increase access to vaccines, leverage Code Tenderlon’s Neighborhood Ambassador Program to engage in on-the-ground outreach, and expand its Calming Corners program (of which PagerDuty was a founding partner in Spring 2020) to distribute hygiene kits and public health preventative education.

Code The Dream is a tech equity nonprofit working to ensure the nearly three million agriculture and migrant farmworkers across the United States receive culturally-relevant COVID-19 information in their preferred language and have access to the vaccine. With PagerDuty’s support, they will expand the reach of the two mobile apps its team has co-created with local partners. They are Conectate Carolina—the only app of its kind in North Carolina—and Vamos—an app currently used in five states—to help scale communication and outreach efforts to thousands of migrant workers. These workers may not be able to access the vaccine or up-to-date information due to isolation, language barriers, and lack of connection to resources in the community.

Doctors Without Borders will channel PagerDuty’s support to bolster its on-the-ground COVID-19 vaccination rollout program in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory which continues to experience major disparities in access to vaccines and medical services. Working with Puerto Rico Salud (a local organization founded by Doctors Without Borders aid workers), Doctors Without Borders will directly deliver lifesaving vaccines and combat vaccine hesitancy in hard-to-reach areas. The team will also reach vulnerable populations with high-risk factors—such as individuals who are experiencing homlessness, living in long-term care facilities, and/or living with disabilities.

Mobile Pathways is a pioneer for democratizing justice via technology. It has formed a coalition of 26 immigration-focused grassroots organizations that work across rural and metro regions in California, Texas, New York, South Dakota, New Jersey, United States-Mexico border areas. Its teams work to educate under-documented and detained immigrants and refugees about their vaccine rights, and to combat vaccine misinformation via data-driven outreach efforts. PagerDuty’s funding will support local partner campaigns to help overcome vaccine reluctance within these communities and help families navigate the vaccination process through mobile technology.

“PagerDuty’s support will enable Mobile Pathways to expand its coalition of immigration-based nonprofits that leverage technology to support direct outreach via text message and video to marginalized communities in the United States and Mexico. Our community-based approach addresses vaccine hesitancy by providing trusted information and resources to ensure equitable, safe access to the Covid-19 vaccine.”
— Bart Skorupa, Co-Founder & Development Director

Vision y Compromiso is a community health organization serving Latino residents in Central Valley, California, including low-wage farmworkers, frontline essential workers, and immigrants and refugees of all ages and residency status. With support from PagerDuty, Vision y Compromiso’s trained teams of Promotores—community leaders—will carry out culturally and linguistically relevant outreach and education to reach 10,000 residents. These programs will ensure equitable vaccine access in Central Valley counties that have been disproportionately impacted by high rates of COVID-19 infections, deaths, economic turmoil, and mental health and education crises.

PagerDuty.org is proud to support and partner with these organizations working to increase vaccine availability, access, and trust. Our efforts will ensure everyone has the opportunity and relevant information to be vaccinated—including and especially those who have historically been economically or socially marginalized. Together, we will deliver more COVID-19 vaccines faster in the United States and globally—with a focus on underserved communities—and to help prepare communities and equip health systems to deploy and administer vaccines as they become globally available.

Go Give One Campaign To Close the Global Vaccine Equity Gap

In addition to the $1 million USD commitment to our partners, PagerDuty co-launched the Go Give One Coalition campaign in June alongside Salesforce, Workday, Russell Reynolds, and Pledge 1%. The campaign aims to take a global, proactive approach to drive funding upstream, in order to mobilize a global approach to equitably procure and distribute vaccines to the hardest-to-reach communities.

Created by the World Health Organization (WHO) Foundation, the funding raised will go to the COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC). COVAX AMC is an innovative financial mechanism to ensure that the poorest countries receive COVID-19 vaccines, regardless of their ability to pay.

Together with our coalition partners, we call on our employees, customers, and industry peers to come together to ensure everyone, everywhere can receive the vaccine and help reach our collective goal of delivering two billion doses by early 2022. Just $5 provides a life-saving vaccine for someone who needs it. Our collective energy can help vaccinate billions of people around the world, protecting everyone’s loved ones and safeguarding our communities.

PagerDuty.org is committed to protecting and advancing equal opportunity for all persons to enjoy maximal health and wellbeing by ensuring everyone has the opportunity to be vaccinated. We are proud to support and partner with these organizations to deliver more COVID-19 vaccines faster.

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The leading cause of death in the world today is delay—delay in acute care and emergency response, routine screening, disease surveillance, inventory management, or staff resourcing. For low-income individuals, these threats to health are exquisitely time sensitive and largely curable.

In this current pandemic, we’re seeing a convergence of four factors that worsen health outcomes for people and increase the burden on healthcare responders, including:

• An exponential rise in patients requiring acute care
• Inequities by race, ethnicity, and geography
• Service disruptions and delays
• Rapid digital transformation required to manage increased and virtual patient loads

With the immediate and indelible effects of COVID-19 compounding each day, it’s imperative we work together to reduce both delay and inequities in healthcare. To help address these specific challenges and improve acute and longer-term health outcomes, regardless of one’s geography, race, or socio-economic status, PagerDuty.org will invest in partnerships, innovations, and models of care that improve health outcomes by reaching people faster.

Grants to Save Lives by Reaching People Faster

By providing healthcare organizations with the ability to orchestrate action in critical moments to save lives, PagerDuty can help tackle a pivotal piece of the healthcare system. We launched the PagerDuty.org Fund last fall to focus on Time-Critical Health with a mission to help save lives by reaching people faster, with a particular investment in underresourced populations. Specifically, we support health organizations that provide essential care to improve outcomes for the most underserved populations and for which technology is inherent in the solution.

PagerDuty.org will award unrestricted grant funding to generate extraordinary partnerships that scale impact in the area of time-critical health. As part of the funding, we also include free PagerDuty product licenses and product support to help your organization use the technology within your work (if your organization is not currently using PagerDuty, you must pilot it as part of this grant within the year). Nonprofits, NGOs, social welfare organizations, government entities, and for-profit social enterprises are eligible to apply.

In particular, we seek to help organizations:

• For whom time-critical healthcare is the central mission
• Whose work centers on reaching people faster and saving lives
• That use technology to drive efficiency, scale, and innovation in their solutions, and that can benefit from PagerDuty’s platform for real-time operations
• That prioritize the most underresourced populations
• That function within a health system

Examples of what we might fund:

• Vaccine preservation and delivery
• Health hotline reliability, triage, and orchestration
• Disease surveillance and contact tracing
• Medicine and PPE supply inventory and delivery
• Faster access to care and medicine

Apply for a Grant From the PagerDuty.org Fund

If your work is centered in reaching people faster to improve health outcomes and save lives, we encourage you to apply for a grant. We are accepting applications through July 31, 2020, and will announce grantees by September 15, 2020.

Learn more about PagerDuty.org’s Time-Critical Health funding and apply for a grant here. Join our live Q&A on July 15, 2020, to learn more about the grant round and PagerDuty’s platform for real-time action.

^{1 “The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequality of the Coronavirus,” The New York Times, July 5, 2020.}

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