These Leaders Proved Tech Is A Force For Social Innovation In 2019
David Dines
From protecting our children from online sexual abuse, to helping domestic workers access portable benefits, to empowering citizens to get engaged in their democracy, leaders of tech nonprofits are shaping how tech drives social change. I’m excited to highlight their far-reaching impact by sharing some of their accomplishments from 2019. As we enter a new decade, these innovators give me faith that responsible tech can scale to improve lives around the world. And bonus: these leaders are all women.
Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn
Online child sexual abuse is an invisible yet urgent crisis: there were 45 million reports of child sexual abuse material in the US in 2018. Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn, is leading the tech nonprofit in building tools to defend our children’s safety online.
Thorn’s products are working. Spotlight, its flagship product, is already reducing victim identification time by over 60%. 2019 saw the launch of Thorn’s next product, Safer, which helps companies speed up the identification and removal of child abuse content. Leading companies like Slack and Flickr have already partnered with Safer, and the product has hashed over 1 billion images to identify abuse material.
In 2019, Thorn was awarded a TED Audacious grant to support its bold goal to eliminate child trafficking and child porn. Cordua’s TED Talk has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, increasing awareness around the world about the crisis and Thorn’s tech-driven interventions.
Nithya Ramanathan, Co-Founder and CEO of Nexleaf Analytics
Nexleaf designs solutions to protect vaccines in rural health facilities. Equipment used to maintain vaccines in cold temperatures can fail. Nexleaf’s tech alerts clinicians when vaccines are in danger of spoiling–which would lead to damaged vaccines and unprotected children. 2019 marked Nexleaf’s 10 year anniversary, and an incredible milestone: Nexleaf’s tech is being used in over 15,000 health facilities across 8 countries, protecting vaccines for 12 million babies each year. In 2019, the organization partnered with the International Migration Organization to implement its vaccine monitoring solution in refugee camps across 30 countries.
Nexleaf is on its way to expanding its impact through cutting-edge tech. As a grantee of the 2019 Google AI Impact Challenge, the organization will use AI to predict vaccine degradation and develop an end-to-end system that ensures safe vaccine delivery.
Palak Shah, Social Innovations Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance and Founding Director, NDWA Labs
Every worker deserves benefits like insurance and paid time off. NDWA Labs, the innovation arm of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) led by Palak Shah, is helping domestic workers get portable benefits through Alia. Through the online platform, house cleaners use contributions from clients to purchase benefits like disability insurance and paid time off. In 2019, Alia teamed up with Thumbtack to support home cleaners on the platform. Thumbtack delivers information about Alia to every house cleaner on its platform, sets them up with an account, and gives each cleaner who joins Alia a $25 contribution to jump-start their benefits fund.
This year, NDWA Labs announced its plan to fuel innovation in job quality for domestic workers. In response to the lack of innovation in the domestic work space, Shah shared: “we plan to fund ideation, pre-seed, and seed stage entrepreneurs and ventures, all of which seek to solve problems domestic workers face such as disrespect, low wages, insufficient hours, and lack of benefits.”
Nexleaf’s technology alerts clinicians when vaccines are in danger of spoiling
Heejae Lim, Founder and CEO of TalkingPoints
Parent engagement drives student success twice as much as a family’s socioeconomic status. It’s more important than home neighborhood or parental education level. Yet many low-income families struggle to get involved in their child’s education due to language barriers. Heejae Lim built TalkingPoints, the much-needed multilingual engagement platform that allows families and teachers to communicate with each other. As of 2019, TalkingPoints has facilitated over 10 million conversations, with more than half enabled by TalkingPoints’ translation technology.
AI innovation to boost family engagement is on the horizon for TalkingPoints. As winners of the 2019 Google AI Impact Challenge, the organization will use AI to provide personalized, real-time coaching content to parents and teachers while continuing to improve the translation quality of its platform.
Jaime-Alexis Fowler, Founder and Executive Director of Empower Work
Jaime-Alexis Fowler is on a mission to make work work. She is the founder and Executive Director of Empower Work, the tech nonprofit that provides real-time support for people experiencing problems at work. This year, Empower Work took its crisis text line to national scale, passing 130,000 messages exchanged across nearly 50 states. But Fowler’s not stopping there: the organization is on track to break 250,000 messages by 2021.
In 2019, Empower Work made strides in not only the number of messages facilitated, but its approach to spreading awareness about the free service to workers. The organization honed in on meeting workers where they are and teamed up with public transit and advertising organizations to reach people on buses, elevators, and everywhere in between. Creative partnerships like these are helping Empower Work democratize access to support for workers across the country.
Maria Yuan, Founder of IssueVoter
New laws are passed almost every single day, yet most Americans only hear about a few each year. IssueVoter is on a mission to change this. Led by Maria Yuan, IssueVoter is the one-stop-shop for Americans to engage with issues they care about. The online platform provides information on bills, tracks representatives’ votes, and allows users to contact Congress directly.
In 2019, IssueVoter analyzed and delivered information on over 100 bills–most of which were not in the news. From a bill reforming immigration for agricultural workers, to an environmental bill that would classify certain chemicals as hazardous substances, IssueVoter kept Americans in the loop about important–but hard to access–legislation in the works. In doing so, the organization empowered Americans to send over one million opinions to congress regarding these bills. IssueVoter is making exciting strides in its mission to ensure that everyone has a voice in our democracy.
While I’m unsure what challenges the next decade will bring, I’m optimistic that leaders like these are poised to advance how positive impact is made through technology. From protecting life-saving vaccines to helping employees navigate tough work situations, I can’t wait to see how these leaders shape the products that are fundamentally transforming tech’s role in our world.