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The tech sector get a lot of press that seems to be pretty gossipy and negative, but that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Many of the most well-known companies, and entrepreneurs, regularly give money to charitable causes. 2016 has only been around for four months, and there have been a large number of philanthropic efforts already.
The most recent is Google, which announced on Tuesday that it will be donating $250,000 through its charitable arm, Google.org to help solve the water crisis in Flint, Michigan
A brief background: to save money, the city of Flint decided to switch its water source to the Flint River. That corroded the nearly century-old pipes, putting lead in the water and causing a serious health crisis. It is one of the most distressing, and depressing, stories to come out of this country recently.
Google’s donation includes a $150,000 grant to the University of Michigan-Flint, so that it can “develop a comprehensive data platform that will assist government and community leaders in making more informed decisions about the crisis and providing critical information to citizens.”
The platform and app will allows citizens to request services, and report concerns about water and requesting testing kits.
The other $100,000 donation will go to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint for the Flint Child Health & Development Fund. Sadly, many of those who were most affected by the contaminated water were children and babies.
“Access to clean drinking water is a concern all over the world, but in the United States it’s often a foregone conclusion. That is not the case recently for the residents of Flint, Michigan, many of whom we now know have been exposed to lead in their tap water. It’s a crisis, one to which the American people readily responded by donating water and resources to help alleviate the immediate pain,” Mike Miller, Head of Google Michigan, wrote in a blog post.
“But the problem won’t go away quickly, and understanding its extent is both challenging and an absolute necessity.”
In addition, around $35,000 has already been donated from Google employees, and Google’s gift match program, to the United Way of Genesee County and the Flint Water Fund.
Obviously this donation from Google isn’t going to solve the problem, Ironically, it’s going to cost millions of dollars to fix, with miles and miles of corroded lead pipes that need to be replaced, negating any savings the city and state hoped to get by switching the source in the first place.
Top social donations by tech companies in 2016
Google is far from the only example of charitable giving from the tech sector this year so far.
In April, Sean Parker, founder of the music file-sharing service Napster and the founding president of Facebook, gave $250 million to six cancer centers nationwide, including Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering and Stanford.
The donation was the largest ever for cancer immunotherapy.
The same month, Facebook announced the Facebook F8 Scholarship, created with a $250,000 donation from Facebook and combined with an additional contribution from Dev Bootcamp. The scholarships cover the full tuition for 20 women and underrepresented minority students to join the Dev Bootcamp San Francisco program this year.
In April, Amazon announced that it would donate an empty building, rent free, on its South Lake Union campus to Mary’s Place to use as a temporary emergency night shelter for homeless families until the building is scheduled for demolition in spring 2017.
The new Mary’s Place Guest Room shelter opened on April 18th and, earlier this month, CEO Jeff Bezos agreed to personally match any donation made to Mary’s Place on May 3, up to a total of $1 million.
In March, it was revealed that executives from Netflix, Twitter, and YouTube have made donations to the Baltimore mayoral campaign of Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. That included Twitter’s executive chairman Omid Kordestani and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who each contributed $6,000.
In April, Oracle and The White House announced a plan to invest $200 million in direct and in-kind support for computer science education in the United States over the next 18 months. It is expected to reach more than 232,000 students in over 1,100 U.S. institutions through Oracle Academy, its philanthropic CS-focused educational program that impacts more than 2.6 million students in 106 countries.
Just today, DuckDuckGo, an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy, donated $25,000 to a number of organizations dedicated to privacy, including the Tor Project, the CrypTech Project and the Freenet Project.
(Image source: npr.org)
