Posted by Shona Brown, SVP, Google.org (Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on some grants we're making to support education, technology and the fight against modern day slavery.
STEM and girls’ education Citizen Schools and Generating Genius in the U.K., both of which work to help to expand the horizons of underprivileged youngsters. In total, our grants will provide enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students.
In addition, we're supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving a girl an education, you not only improve her opportunities, but those of her whole family. The African Leadership Academy provides merit scholarships to promising young women across the continent, and the Afghan Institute of Learning offers literacy classes to women and girls in rural Afghanistan. Groups like these will use our funds to educate more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.
Empowerment through technology Vittana , for instance, helps lenders offer loans to students in the developing world who have have a 99 percent repayment rate—potentially doubling or tripling a recipient's earning power. Code for America enables the web industry to share its skills with the public sector by developing projects that improve transparency and encourage civic engagement on a mass scale. And Switchboard is working with local mobile providers to help African health care workers create networks and communicate for free.,/p>
Fighting slavery and human trafficking International Justice Mission (IJM) , along with The BBC World Service Trust , Action Aid and Aide et Action , are forming a new coalition. It will work on the ground with governments to stop slave labor by identifying the ring masters, documenting abuse, freeing individuals and providing them with therapy as well as job training. Our support will also help expand the reach of tools like the powerful Slavery Footprint calculator and Polaris Project’s National Trafficking Hotline .
To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our Google Gives Back 2011 site and take a look at this video:
These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support (programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.
As 2011 draws to a close, I’m inspired by this year’s grantees and look forward to seeing their world-changing work in 2012.
I adamently support Google's efforts regarding girls and STEM. As a parent concerned about equality in education, I have strongly encouraged the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA (where my son is a senior and has been rated the #1 High School in the U.S. for three years in a row by US News & World Report)to create a mentoring program for women considering a career in the technology sector. I hope such efforts will make a difference and we will see more women wanting to attend CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and similar institutions in the future.
ReplyDeleteThank you for donating to organizations that are fighting human trafficking. If you're able, please also consider giving to www.love146.org
ReplyDeleteThank you!