Our Spring 2024 Tech for Good Grant Round was insightful and hope-giving through our often troubling and uncertain times.
As we connected with our community, we got real about challenges, including:
- the ways tech has left misrepresented and underresourced communities behind
- the lack of diverse representation in leadership
- biases in tech design
- increased misinformation and community divides
We also learned about tech for good solutions and opportunities, including:
- the importance of changemakers with lived experiences leading tech organizations
- solving for root issues
- accessible tech training
- increased affordability of tech services and products
- how small or growing orgs can make a big impact
- equitable, rapid access to information and resources
After a holistic community nomination, learning, and selection process, we selected Ambition Angels and Tarjimly as our newest Grantee Partners. Each nonprofit received $90,000 of unrestricted funding over three years, and SV2’s beyond-the-dollars support. We are deeply honored to be in partnership with both of these outstanding organizations!
Ambition Angels, founded in 2022, is on a mission to transform smartphones into tools of personal and professional growth for teens. Schools often don’t have classes for life skills such as goal-setting, decision-making, and financial literacy. Apps that are the most successful at engaging teens don’t necessarily have their best interests in mind. Ambition Angels focuses on black and brown teens, and empowers them with skills, resources, and support to thrive. The Ambition app enables teens to take their development into their own hands. Teens choose from a library of skill-building courses with bite-size, culturally relevant content, e.g. mental health, financial wellbeing, physical fitness, social media, and marketing essentials. 30-day simulated internships expose teens to diverse career paths while equipping them with actionable skills and real-world experience. For each 30-day internship completed, a teen earns $100 that they can redeem in the form of gift cards from their favorite brands.
“One thing I’m going to change after this program is the way in which I convey messages to people. Whether it be apologizing or asking for help from somebody, I’ll be sure to do it the correct way.” – Jason, Ambition Angel’s Communication 101 Participant
Remi Sobomehin, CEO and Founder, Ambition Angels shared
“My parents ran youth nonprofits throughout my childhood and instilled in me a dedication to serve divested communities. All of our youth deserve the highest quality investments, and when that reality comes to fruition, we all benefit.”
After Stanford, Remi spent his career devoted to the community of East Palo Alto, as a school leader and director at the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula, until launching Ambition.
Tarjimly, founded in 2017, is on a mission to eliminate humanitarian language barriers to improve the lives of refugees and immigrants. There are 30 million refugees globally and 44% of them are unable to speak the same language as the people trying to help them. In the US alone, 76% of healthcare providers report inadequate access to interpretation services. Tarjimly offers free and affordable remote interpretation and translation services to nonprofit organizations, humanitarian volunteers, social workers and direct to refugees and immigrants. Tarjimly engages human multi-lingual volunteers who donate their time and skills to provide these services and leverages the power of community to offer free interpretation and translation at scale. Tarjimly rapidly increases community access to important information and essential services, including medical, legal, psycho-social and educational services. Originally a Facebook Messenger bot in a few languages, Tarjimly evolved to meet challenges in language diversity (120 languages), data security, and scalability by creating a HIPAA-compliant mobile app.
“One of my favorite Tarjimly memories is when I was at the ER with a new mom and baby. The mom only spoke Pashto. The doctor at the ER was going to run some tests on the baby so we couldn’t feed him, even though he was hungry and crying. I was struggling to explain to the mom why she couldn’t feed her child. I’m sure it was obvious we were visibly distressed! Then, I remembered Tarjimly and, with the help of a phone call, explained that we could feed the baby in an hour after the doctor ran some important tests. Both the mother and I felt at peace after that. Thank you SO MUCH for providing this service! I am so grateful!” – Aubrey Parke, Volunteer Coordination, Hello Neighbor
Atif Javed, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Tarjimly, served as an interpreter for his own refugee and immigrant family. He shared
“We stepped into the world with growing hate towards our faith, an unending refugee crisis, and an emboldened wave of xenophobia in our country,…”
Atif has always been passionate about creating language access. He graduated from MIT during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. When the travel ban was announced, he left his job as a Product Manager to launch Tarjimly to help thousands of refugees and humanitarian workers overcome language barriers.
34 SV2 Donor Partners participated in our Grant Round. We asked about our Grant Round impact:
“Helps me to be more conscious of how I make my decisions on the organizations I choose to be involved in from a funding or volunteering perspective” – Byron Hill, SV2 Partner
“It opened my eyes and made me appreciate even more the incredible depth, breadth and creativity of solutions being developed in response to so many of the needs in underserved communities.” – Gary Grellman, SV2 Partner
Our Grant Round Community Engagement and Research Team comprised 18 people, a great mix of Grantee Partners, Donor Partners (adults and teen), and staff. Throughout our learning and decision making, we were guided by Donna Hiliard – Code Tenderloin, Iliana Garcia – Pal Center, and Quincy Sanders – StreetCode Academy – outstanding leaders with our Grantee Partner organizations. We are very grateful for this partnership. This Grant Round was co-led by Aarthi Ramaswamy and Shalyn Eason, SV2 Donor Partners, and Amy Badiani, SV2 staff. Aarthi and Shalyn’s thoughtful, detailed, and adaptive leadership created a deeply welcoming and impactful learning experience!