Last month, Cisco announced we exceeded our ten-year goal to positively impact one billion lives - more than one year early.
The announcement was just the first step in our commitment to share the stories within our journey to one billion lives, and to share our approach and learnings to empower organizations of any size in driving real change and lasting social impact in communities around the world.
To achieve our goal to positively impact one billion lives, Cisco forged over 100 partnerships and invested in hundreds of initiatives in nearly two hundred countries, in every region of the world.
We put people at the center of our work and focused on positive impact in the areas of crisis response, learning and digital skills, and economic empowerment.
There are many ways to define impact, so it's important to get clear about how your company will define and measure it.
We worked with our nonprofit partners to develop a shared definition of positive impact.
Together, we agreed that positive impact occurs when an individual has gained access to a critical resource, learned something, or participated in a meaningful way.
For job seekers, positive impact is achieved by completing a training program and obtaining a job that provides stable and sufficient income.
Tracking and validating impact is a complex but crucial process.
This is critical for transparency and accurate reporting, and determining whether you are having the desired impact.
In addition to validating positive impact, our methodology ensures each person counted is unique, and that they are only counted once over time.
We recognized that we could not always accurately quantify the impact of some categories within our Social Impact investments.
To address this, we did not include some of our social impact grants where the nonprofit partner did not have a way to count unique individuals positively impacted.
While investing in proven solutions responds to immediate needs, identifying and investing in new and innovative solutions can help scale and amplify your impact over time.
As a technology company, we believe in the power of technology to connect the unconnected, and also to have impact at scale.
We do this to ensure that our partners can have sustained impact well beyond the lifecycle of our engagement with them.
Our Social Impact Grant partners get the time, space, funding, and flexibility to test their solutions.
Cisco gains a better understanding of the challenge they are solving and what it takes to drive true impact.
As we contemplate our next inspired goal, we're committed to sharing more about what we've learned in positively impacting one billion lives and to understanding more about the challenges faced by communities around the world.
We will share stories of our partners, the work they do, the solutions we have funded, and the lives that have been impacted as a result.
This Cyber News was published on feedpress.me. Publication date: Mon, 22 Jan 2024 21:13:05 +0000