Nearly 29,000 team members joined together during HPE Accelerating Impact in 2020 to direct $1.2M to 40 tech nonprofits building original technology to tackle our world’s toughest challenges. The nonprofits featured in the campaign are led by a diverse set of leaders: 52% of the organizations are led by a woman or gender non-binary person, and 52% of the organizations are led by a person of color.
HPE Accelerating Impact is made possible by HPE Foundation’s partnership with Fast Forward, a tech nonprofit accelerator. “Social impact solutions that leverage tech are more important than they’ve ever been,” says Shannon Farley, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Fast Forward. “HPE’s infusion of capital and support has been instrumental in helping tech nonprofits rise to meet this moment. Because of HPE’s commitment to bolstering this sector, tech nonprofits across health, education, human rights, and environmental sustainability have grown their capacity to address some of our world’s biggest problems.”
Here’s what a few of the tech nonprofits have accomplished during the past six months:
Thorn
Thorn builds tech tools to help law enforcement find victims of child sex trafficking faster. Their latest software product, Safer, enables platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) at the point of upload. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies laid off content moderators, making Safer even more important. Safer has processed over 4 billion images and identified which are suspected abuse material. Thorn has now built the largest known dataset of CSAM to further improve their AI technology. Using Thorn’s software, one photo-sharing site was able to report abuse images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Using this intel, law enforcement identified 21 child victims, removed them from harm, and arrested their perpetrators.
Dost Education
Dost’s daily, 1 minute podcast calls (“phonecasts”) provide parents with tips, activities, and encouragement to promote early learning at home. In response to COVID-19, Dost jumped into action and built a 6-week audio program on COVID-19 safety measures and mental wellness to share critical information with parents. To date, over 50,000 families have received Dost’s COVID-specific resources, and they listened to these phonecasts at twice Dost’s usual engagement rate. 75% of the parents surveyed reported that they have since incorporated Dost’s recommended parent and child wellness routines into their daily lives.
Learning Equality
Learning Equality’s offline learning platform, Kolibri, has helped educate over 6 million students to date. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kolibri became a crucial resource to enable offline learning in communities around the world amidst school closures. To expand their reach, Learning Equality partnered with UNESCO, UNHCR and others to mobilize volunteers to translate digital picture books into new languages for students unable to attend school. Learning Equality also recently added digital learning resources in French to the Kolibri Content Library, which will make their offline learning platform accessible to the 275 million French speakers around the world who do not have reliable internet access.
Hopebound
Hopebound launched their virtual therapy platform for under-resourced adolescents who are less likely to have access to mental health support, and started their first pilot in May 2020. To date, Hopebound has run two pilots, serving a total of 50 low-income youth in Atlanta and Newark. During both pilots, Hopebound connected the youth to mental health clinicians for one-on-one weekly therapy sessions.
Movers & Shakers
This winter, during Black History Month, Movers & Shakers will launch their augmented reality Monuments Project App and curriculum in 100 under-resourced schools to share the history of women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ icons. The startup is also developing a novel digital learning experience called Unsung, an AR learning experience that tells the story of four Black women singers who used their voices to fight for social change. Movers & Shakers is gearing up to release Unsung in 100 Title 1 middle schools next fall.
Our team members will have additional engagement opportunities in the coming months to continue supporting the HPE Accelerating Impact tech nonprofits. We look forward to seeing what they accomplish together next.
HPE Editor
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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HPE-Editor
Editor-in-chief for the HPE Advancing Life & Work blog.
