Tag Archives: google.org

A Matter of Impact: February updates from Google.org

Editor’s note: Welcome to A Matter of Impact, Google.org’s monthly digest, where we highlight what the team’s been up to and spotlight some of the incredible nonprofits and Google.org Fellows helping solve some of society’s biggest challenges through technology and innovation. 

It didn’t take long for the effects of COVID-19 to reveal a devastating, but predictable, truth: the pandemic has had an outsized impact on marginalized groups, especially people of color. At Google.org, we aim to bring the best of Google to support underserved communities. So when we made a $100 million grant and 50,000 pro bono hour commitment to support COVID-19 relief, we focused our efforts on addressing the compounding racial and social inequities of this crisis. 

As we join forces to fight this pandemic, we must put equity at the center of our response and lift up our most vulnerable communities. Here you’ll find updates about our work that’s at the intersection of COVID-19 relief and equity and two themes that remain top priorities for us.

Equitable distribution of vaccines and health information

Data shows that COVID-19 affects people of color at much higher rates: about 71% percent of Black Americans and 61% of Hispanic Americans know someone who has died or been hospitalized from the virus compared to 48% of white Americans. Yet data also shows that Black Americans are getting vaccinated at lower rates than their peers. That’s why we have a team of Google.org Fellows working full-time with the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine to help create a Health Equity Tracker to map and contextualize COVID-19 health disparities in communities of color throughout the U.S. We’re also committing $5 million in grants to organizations addressing racial and geographic disparities in COVID-19 vaccinations.

Support for minority-owned small businesses

Turning to the economy, reports have shown that 41% of Black-owned businesses — about 440,000 businesses — have shuttered due to COVID-19 compared to 17% of businesses owned by white people. To support minority business owners through the pandemic, we’ve supported Common Future with grant funding to provide capital and technical assistance to 2,000 women and minority small-business entrepreneurs in the U.S. We’ll also provide opportunities for Google volunteers to assist them with skill-based coaching and mentoring. 

Read the rest of our Google.org updates below.

In case you missed it 

Yesterday, leading academic organizations with support from a team of Google.org Fellows, shared the launch of Global.health, a data platform that helps model the trajectory of COVID-19 and future disease. Last month, we launched a Google.org Impact Challenge to help bridge the digital divide in Central and Eastern Europe, and announced $3 million in grants to help underserved communities in Kenya during a virtual summit with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, and H.E. Uhuru Kenyatta, President of the Republic of Kenya.
Watch this video on YouTube to learn more about the Global.health platform.
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Hear from one of our grantees: Common Future

Rodney Foxworth is the CEO of Common Future, a network of leaders helping to build an economy that includes everyone. Last spring, Common Future received a $5 million Google.org grant to provide capital and technical assistance to women and minority small business entrepreneurs in the U.S. 

Headshot of Rodney Foxworth laughing in front of a red brick wall.

Rodney Foxworth is the CEO of Common Future, a Google.org grantee. 


“As we think about long-term COVID-19 recovery, we need to stabilize and uplift small businesses. Common Future, with support from Google.org, has been able to give grants to over 30 organizations that do just that. These entrepreneurial-support organizations (ESOs) that we supported serve roughly 2,000 small businesses across the U.S. — 76% of these organizations are run by people of color and 62% are run by women — and center on inclusive lending models. For example, a few organizations that we work with are pioneering character-based lending models, as many business-owners of color are excluded from the traditional banking sector due to traditional credit and collateral requirements.”

A few words with a Google.org Fellow: Colin Jackson

Colin Jackson is a product manager who recently completed a Google.org Fellowship with Satcher Health Leadership Institute (SHLI) at Morehouse School of Medicine. 

A headshot of Colin Jackson.

Colin Jackson is a Google.org Fellow with Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine.

“I grew up Black in America, but I was raised by a white family. This gave me a unique perspective on health inequity. I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child since my little sister was diagnosed with cancer when she was two years old. In the midst of that pain I very quickly became aware of the different ways I was treated in medical spaces when I was alone compared to when I was with my family. Helping develop SHLI’s Health Equity Tracker was such a natural fit for me, and the experience was deeply rewarding. I felt like I was returning to those hospitals I spent so much time in as a child, but this time with the power to make a difference.”

How anonymized data helps fight against disease

Data has always been a vital tool in understanding and fighting disease — from Florence Nightingale’s 1800s hand drawn illustrations that showed how poor sanitation contributed to preventable diseases to the first open source repository of data developed in response to the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa. When the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, data again became one of the most critical tools to combat the pandemic. 

A group of researchers, who documented the initial outbreak, quickly joined forces and started collecting data that could help epidemiologists around the world model the trajectory of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The researchers came from University of Oxford, Tsinghua University, Northeastern University and Boston Children’s Hospital, among others. 

However, their initial workflow was not designed for the exponential rise in cases. The researchers turned to Google.org for help. As part of Google’s $100 million contribution to COVID relief, Google.org granted $1.25 million in funding and provided a team of 10 fulltime Google.org Fellows and 7 part-time Google volunteers to assist with the project.  

Google volunteers worked with the researchers to create Global.health, a scalable and open-access platform that pulls together millions of anonymized COVID-19 cases from over 100 countries. This platform helps epidemiologists around the world model the trajectory of COVID-19, and track its variants and future infectious diseases. 

The need for trusted and anonymized case data

When an outbreak occurs, timely access to organized, trustworthy and anonymized data is critical for public health leaders to inform early policy decisions, medical interventions, and allocations of resources — all of which can slow disease spread and save lives. The insights derived from “line-list” data (e.g. anonymized case level information), as opposed to aggregated data such as case counts, are essential for epidemiologists to perform more detailed statistical analyses and model the effectiveness of interventions. 

Volunteers at the University of Oxford started manually curating this data, but it was spread over hundreds of websites, in dozens of formats, in multiple languages. The HealthMap team at Boston Children’s Hospital also identified early reports of COVID-19 through automated indexing of news sites and official sources. These two teams joined forces, shared the data, and published peer-reviewed findings to create a trusted resource for the global community.

Enter the Google.org Fellowship

To help the global community of researchers in this meaningful endeavour, Google.org decided to offer the support of 10 Google.org Fellows who spent 6 months working full-time on Global.health, in addition to $1.25M in grant funding. Working hand in hand with the University of Oxford and Boston Children’s Hospital, the Google.org team spoke to researchers and public health officials working on the frontline to understand real-life challenges they faced when finding and using high-quality trusted data — a tedious and manual process that often takes hours. 

Upholding data privacy is key to the platform’s design. The anonymized data used at Global.health comes from open-access authoritative public health sources, and a panel of data experts rigorously checks it to make sure it meets strict anonymity requirements. The Google.org Fellows assisted the Global.health team to design the data ingestion flow to implement best practices for data verification and quality checks to make sure that no personal data made its way into the platform. (All line-list data added to the platform is stored and hosted in Boston Children’s Hospital’s secure data infrastructure, not Google’s.)

Looking to the future

With the support of Google.org and The Rockefeller Foundation, Global.health has grown into an international consortium of researchers at leading universities curating the most comprehensive line-list COVID-19 database in the world.  It includes millions of anonymized records from trusted sources spanning over 100 countries, including India.

Today, Global.health helps researchers across the globe access data in a matter of minutes and a series of clicks. The flexibility of the Global.health platform means that it can be adapted to any infectious disease data and local context as new outbreaks occur. Global.health lays a foundation for researchers and public health officials to access this data no matter their location, be it New York, São Paulo, Munich, Kyoto or Nairobi.

Posted by Stephen Ratcliffe, Google.org Fellow and the Global.health team

How anonymized data helps fight against disease

Data has always been a vital tool in understanding and fighting disease — from Florence Nightingale’s 1800s hand drawn illustrations that showed how poor sanitation contributed to preventable diseases to the first open source repository of datadeveloped in response to the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa. When the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, data again became one of the most critical tools to combat the pandemic. 

A group of researchers, who documented the initial outbreak, quickly joined forces and started collecting data that could help epidemiologists around the world model the trajectory of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The researchers came from University of Oxford, Tsinghua University, Northeastern University and Boston Children’s Hospital, among others. 

However, their initial workflow was not designed for the exponential rise in cases. The researchers turned to Google.org for help. As part of Google’s $100 million contribution to COVID relief, Google.org granted $1.25 million in funding and provided a team of 10 fulltime Google.org Fellows and 7 part-time Google volunteers to assist with the project.  

Google volunteers worked with the researchers to create Global.health, a scalable and open-access platform that pulls together millions of anonymized COVID-19 cases from over 100 countries. This platform helps epidemiologists around the world model the trajectory of COVID-19, and track its variants and future infectious diseases. 


The need for trusted and anonymized case data

When an outbreak occurs, timely access to organized, trustworthy and anonymized data is critical for public health leaders to inform early policy decisions, medical interventions, and allocations of resources — all of which can slow disease spread and save lives. The insights derived from “line-list” data (e.g. anonymized case level information), as opposed to aggregated data such as case counts, are essential for epidemiologists to perform more detailed statistical analyses and model the effectiveness of interventions. 

Volunteers at the University of Oxford started manually curating this data, but it was spread over hundreds of websites, in dozens of formats, in multiple languages. The HealthMap team at Boston Children’s Hospital also identified early reports of COVID-19 through automated indexing of news sites and official sources. These two teams joined forces, shared the data, and published peer-reviewed findings to create a trusted resource for the global community.


Enter the Google.org Fellowship

To help the global community of researchers in this meaningful endeavour, Google.org decided to offer the support of 10 Google.org Fellows who spent 6 months working full-time onGlobal.health, in addition to $1.25M in grant funding. Working hand in hand with the University of Oxford and Boston Children’s Hospital, the Google.org team spoke to researchers and public health officials working on the frontline to understand real-life challenges they faced when finding and using high-quality trusted data — a tedious and manual process that often takes hours. 

Upholding data privacy is key to the platform’s design. The anonymized data used at Global.health comes from open-access authoritative public health sources, and a panel of data experts rigorously checks it to make sure it meets strict anonymity requirements. The Google.org Fellows assisted the Global.health team to design the data ingestion flow to implement best practices for data verification and quality checks to make sure that no personal data made its way into the platform. (All line-list data added to the platform is stored and hosted in Boston Children’s Hospital’s secure data infrastructure, not Google’s.)


Looking to the future

With the support of Google.org and The Rockefeller Foundation, Global.health has grown into an international consortium of researchers at leading universities curating the most comprehensive line-list COVID-19 database in the world.  It includes millions of anonymized records from trusted sources spanning over 100 countries.

Today, Global.health helps researchers across the globe access data in a matter of minutes and a series of clicks. The flexibility of the Global.health platform means that it can be adapted to any infectious disease data and local context as new outbreaks occur. Global.health lays a foundation for researchers and public health officials to access this data no matter their location, be it New York, São Paulo, Munich, Kyoto or Nairobi.

Honoring the legacy of Black-owned businesses in the U.S.

In this post:This Black History Month, we’re highlighting Black-owned businesses and showing our support through funding and training.

In 1946, Irene and Clint Cleaves opened The Four Way Grill with a simple mission: Serve the best soul food in all of Memphis. And for the last 75 years, they’ve done just that and more. In its early days, The Four Way was one of the few places where Black and white diners sat together, and it was considered a safe haven for leaders of the civil rights movement to recharge and enjoy a good meal. And today under the stewardship of the Bates family, The Four Way Restaurant remains a cornerstone of the Memphis community and symbol of Black American history. 

Historically, Black-owned businesses have served as gathering spots for Black communities throughout the country and provided a strong sense of ownership and belonging for those who were denied equal rights. And today, as more Black businesses come online, they’re creating new pathways for economic opportunity and generational wealth in the Black community. As we kick off the first day of Black History Month, we want to shine a light on Black-owned businesses, big and small, and honor their resilience and ingenuity.

Making it easier to find and support Black businesses 

In the past 12 months, Google search interest for “black owned businesses” has skyrocketed 600% based on Google Trends data comparing January-December 2019 to January-December 2020. Across the country, people have been looking for “black owned restaurants,” “black owned bookstores,” “black owned beauty supply” and more, which speaks to the diversity within the Black business community. We want to make it easier for people to support and spend dollars with the Black businesses they love. Starting today, we’re extending the Black-owned attribute to Google’s Shopping tab, so people can easily identify and buy from Black-owned businesses on Google. Business owners can add the Black-owned attribute by visiting the Google Merchant Help Center. The feature will become visible to shoppers and available to all U.S. Google Merchants in coming months. This update builds on the Black-owned business attribute we launched across Google Search and Maps last summer and is another way people can shop with Black businesses across Google’s products and platforms. 

The Black-owned business attribute on Google’s Shopping tab.

The Black-owned business attribute on Google’s Shopping tab.

Funding organizations that support the Black small business community 

Reports have shown that 41% of Black-owned businesses — about 440,000 businesses — have been shuttered due to COVID-19. Through our partnership with Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), over $30 million in loans and Google.org grants to support Black-owned businesses and community lenders have been distributed to local organizations; that’s out of the $50 million we committed through the Grow with Google Small Business Fund announced back in June. We also provided a $5 million Google.org grantto Common Future, which through its network, has distributed the funding to community organizations supporting women and minority small business owners throughout the U.S. and is providing technical assistance and coaching to businesses. Click through to meet some of the Black-owned small businesses and community-centered organizations that have received funding.

  • Donte Miller and Harriett Williams

    Harriett Williams and Donte Miller are co-Founders of the Village Micro Fund, which is a social impact fund dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs in Metro Atlanta, GA. The Village Micro Fund works to fill the access gaps in financing, education, technical assistance, and cooperative development for small black and brown businesses and prove that under-resourced communities around the country can self direct the development of their neighborhoods. The Village Micro Fund received funding from Common Future, with support from Google.org. (Photo by Adrianna Clark)

  • JC Smith

    JC Smith and Jeff Smith launched Bailiwick Clothing Company to represent and elevate the pride and positive energy of the District of Columbia. Facing unprecedented challenges in the face of COVID-19, the brothers turned to Washington Area Community Investment Fund (Wacif) for financing and technical assistance, with support from the Grow with Google Small Business Fund and Google.org.

  • Sheila standing in front of her store, Liha

    Sheila owns mobile boutique Liha on 125th Street in Harlem next to the iconic Apollo Theater. When COVID-19 hit New York City in March, Sheila had to shut down her store due to social distancing mandates and quickly pivoted her business online with financing and technical assistance from Grameen America, with support from the Grow with Google Small Business Fund and Google.org.

  • Jessica Norwood

    Jessica Norwood is the CEO of RUNWAY, a national financial innovation firm that advances resiliency for Black businesses and the communities they serve by building emergent financial practices and infrastructure that closes the racial wealth gap for good. RUNWAY provides Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs with early-stage “We believe in you” funding and holistic business support in order to bridge the racial wealth gap for African-Americans and their local communities. RUNWAY received funding from Common Future, with support from Google.org.  (Photo by Toni Riales)

  • Tim Lampkin

    Tim Lampkin is the CEO of Higher Purpose Co. (HPC), an economic justice nonprofit working to build community wealth with Black residents in Mississippi by supporting the ownership of financial, cultural, and political power. By using a solutions-based organizing and community wealth building approach, HPC unapologetically tackles the generational poverty, structured inequality, and institutional racism in Mississippi. Higher Purpose received funding from Common Future, with support from Google.org.  (Photo by Trent Calvin Photography)

  • Jennie L. Stephens

    Jennie L. Stephens is the CEO of theCenter for Heirs Property Preservation, which is a non-profit that helps families protect and keep their family land, build generational wealth and grow working landscape.  The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation protects heirs’ property and promotes the sustainable use of land to provide increased economic benefit to historically underserved landowners. The Center for Heirs Property Preservation received funding from Common Future, with support from Google.org.

In addition to financial support, Google recently expanded the Grow with Google Digital Coaches program to 20 cities across the U.S. in order to provide 50,000 additional Black-owned businesses with mentorship, networking and training they need to grow. To date, Digital Coaches have helped train over 58,000 Black and Latino small business owners through more than 1,000 digital skills workshops. Throughout Black History Month, our Digital Coaches will host tailored digital skills workshops for Black business owners in their communities. 

These events will culminate in a virtual, national Black Small Business Meetup on February 25 with free workshops, panels and best-practice sharing for more than 500 Black small business owners, entrepreneurs and leaders from across the country. Sign up to attend the free virtual summit at our event website. 

Black businesses are critical to the growth and recovery of the U.S. economy. It’s imperative that we support and invest in Black business owners, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing many of their businesses to close. Black-owned businesses have a rich legacy of community and activism, and it's our collective responsibility to ensure that their legacy continues to thrive for generations to come. 

Help build a digital future in Central & Eastern Europe

Technology has been a lifeline for many European businesses and communities throughout the pandemic—from helping people find accurate health information and buy groceries online to finding new ways to learn and stay connected with loved ones. But equally, the pandemic has also widened the social divide, putting disadvantaged groups at risk of being further left behind. As economies embark on a path to recovery, creating an accessible digital future for everyone will be vital.  

To help fill that need, today we are launching our first Google.org Impact Challenge dedicated to Central and Eastern Europe. With this initiative we are further committing to the region, and we will be distributing €2 million in grants to organizations that are working to bridge the social and digital divide to promote inclusive economic growth and recovery. (For those who are interested, applications are open now until March 1, 2021.) 

Applications for the Google.org Impact Challenge for Central and Eastern Europe are now open.
10:25

Make sure everyone in CEE has access to digital opportunities

This work is particularly important for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), where governments, businesses and communities have outlined their ambition to make digital a driver of economic prosperity for the more than 100 million people who live in the region. The CEE countries are working together as part of the Three Seas Initiative to make that vision a reality, and we are doing our part to help.

Last year Google pledged to help 10 million people and businesses across Europe, Middle East and Africa digitize, grow and find new careers. In the CEE region specifically, we helped 250,000 people grow their digital skills or transition to a digital-focused career in 2020 alone.  

Similarly, just in the past year Google.org has also given more than €1.5 million in individual grant funding to several charitable organisations in Central and Eastern Europe that are working to improve digital-enabled education and economic opportunity. We’ve been inspired by how these organizations give back to their communities. Digital Nation helps facilitate remote employment in disadvantaged areas across Romania through offering a virtual training program tailored to IT jobs and supporting small businesses through digital upskilling. And other organizations, like the Czechitas initiative in Czechia, Women Go Tech in Lithuania and Riga Tech Girls in Latvia, are all working to build a digital future for all and helping connect women to professional opportunities in tech. 

With this Google.org Impact Challenge, we’re excited to see all the new ways organizations can positively impact their communities and build an inclusive digital future for all.  

Apply with your bold ideas by March 1, 2021

Applications for the Google.org Impact Challenge for Central and Eastern Europe are now open. We’re looking for initiatives that aim to rebuild the economy with social inclusion at its core. The ideas can be big or small and at any level of maturity—whether it’s a new idea or a well-established effort poised to scale. Applicants must apply with projects that are charitable in nature, meet the application criteria, and be based in one of the following countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Eligible organizations (including nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies and academic institutions) can apply for support for their charitable projects until March 1, 2021 at g.co/ceechallenge. 

We’ve asked a distinguished panel of experts to advise on the selection of the boldest and brightest project ideas. More than a dozen academics, leaders and civil society activists from across the region will help decide which applicants will receive between €50,000-€250,000 in grant funding and possible support from Google to help with their initiatives.

We hope this support will encourage social innovators across the region to think big about how they can use technology to help individuals and communities in Central and Eastern Europe thrive in a digitized economy. 

Our continuing support for Dreamers

For generations, talented immigrants have helped America drive technological breakthroughs and scientific advancements that have created millions of new jobs in new industries, enriching our culture and our economy.

That’s why we have long supported the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This was established in 2012 and allows “Dreamers” who came to the United States as children to request deferred action and work authorization for a renewal period of two years. Google proudly employs Dreamers who work to build the products you use every day. And we’ve defended their right to stay in the United States by joining amici briefs in court supporting DACA.

Unfortunately, DACA’s immediate future is uncertain. At the end of 2020, a U.S. District Court indicated that it could soon issue a ruling against DACA and bar new applications and ultimately renewals as well, leaving countless Dreamers in limbo during this uncertain time.

We believe it’s important that Dreamers have a chance to apply for protection under the program so that they can safeguard their status in the United States. But in the middle of a global pandemic that has led to economic hardship, especially for the many immigrants playing essential roles on the front lines, there is concern that many Dreamers cannot afford to pay the application fee

We want to do our part, so Google.org is making a $250,000 grant to United We Dream to cover the DACA application fees of over 500 Dreamers. This grant builds on over $35 million in support that Google.org and Google employees have contributed over the years to support immigrants and refugees worldwide, including more than $1 million from Googlers and Google.org specifically supporting DACA and domestic immigration efforts through employee giving campaigns led by HOLA (Google’s Latino Employee Resource Group).

We know this is only a temporary solution. We need legislation that not only protects Dreamers, but also delivers other much-needed reforms. We will support efforts by the new Congress and incoming Administration to pass comprehensive immigration reform that improves employment-based visa programs that enhance American competitiveness, gives greater assurance to immigrant workers and employers, and promotes better and more humane immigration processing and border security practices.

Dreamers and other talented immigrants enrich our communities, contribute to our economy, and exemplify the innovative spirit of America. We’re proud to support them.

AI helps protect Australian wildlife in fire-affected areas

Editor’s note: Today's guest post comes from Darren Grover, Head of Healthy Land and Seascapes at the World Wide Fund For Nature Australia.

Over the next six months, more than 600 sensor cameras will be deployed in bushfire-affected areas across Australia, monitoring and evaluating the surviving wildlife populations. This nationwide effort is part of An Eye on Recovery, a large-scale collaborative camera sensor project, run by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Conservation International, with the support of a $1 million grant from Google.org. Using Wildlife Insights, a platform powered by Google’s Artificial Intelligence technology, researchers across the country will upload and share sensor camera photos to give a clearer picture of how Australian wildlife is coping after the devastating bushfires in the past year.  

Why is this important? 

For many Aussies, the horror of last summer’s fires is still very raw and real. Up to 19 million hectares were burned (more than 73,000 square miles), with 12.6 million hectares primarily forest and bushland. Thirty-three lives were lost and 3,094 homes destroyed. And the wildlife toll? A staggering three billion animals were estimated to have been impacted by the flames. 

Australian bushfire devastation

The scale of the damage is so severe that one year on—as we prepare for the next bushfire season—WWF and scientists are still in the field conducting ecological assessments. Our findings have been sobering. Nearly 61,000 koalas, Australia’s most beloved marsupial, are estimated to have been killed or impacted. Over 300 threatened species were affected, pushing more of our precious wildlife on the fast-track towards extinction.

Hope will prevail

In November, I travelled to Kangaroo Island in South Australia to place the first 100 of the sensor cameras in bushfire-ravaged areas. Though much of the native cover has been decimated by the flames, the island’s wildlife has shown signs of recovery. 

One animal at risk from the flames is the Kangaroo Island dunnart, an adorable, grey-coloured, nocturnal marsupial so elusive that a researcher told WWF that she’d never seen one in the field. We were fortunate to capture this creature of the night on one of our cameras.

Kangaroo Island dunnart

Thou art a dunnart.

But if I hadn’t told you that was a dunnart, you might have thought it was a mouse. And as anyone with thousands of holiday photos will tell you, sorting and organizing heaps of camera pictures and footage can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. Analyzing camera sensor pictures traditionally requires expertise to determine the best pictures (and which ones you can just delete), and you can get hundreds of empty images before you strike gold.

How AI can help 

With the Wildlife Insights platform, we can now identify over 700 species of wildlife in seconds and quickly discard empty images, taking the tedium out of the process and helping scientists and ecologists make better and more informed data assessments.  

The platform will help us identify wildlife in landscapes impacted by last summer’s bushfires, including the Blue Mountains, East Gippsland, South East Queensland, and of course Kangaroo Island. We’re particularly keen to see species like the Hastings River Mouse, a native rodent that was already endangered before fire tore through its habitat in northern New South Wales, and the brush-tailed rock-wallaby, which lost vital habitat and food to blazes in the Blue Mountains.

These images will help us to understand what species have survived in bushfire zones and determine where recovery actions are needed most.

Checking camera traps

WWF-Australia / Slavica Miskovich

Join us to safeguard species

The platform is still growing, and the more images we feed it, the better it will get at recognizing different types of animals. While we’re already rolling out hundreds of sensor cameras across the country, we are calling for more images—and asking Australians to help. If you have any sensor camera footage, please get in touch with us. We’re looking for images specifically from sensor cameras  placed in animal’s habitats, rather than wildlife photography (as beautiful as these pictures may be). 

With your help, we can help safeguard species such as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, marvel at their bright beaming eyes on film, and protect their environment on the ground--so future generations can continue to enjoy the richness of Australia’s wildlife.

Digital tools and skills bring economic recovery in Canada

When 2020 began, like so many others, I saw the opportunity for technology to help businesses grow, positively impact Canadians and address economic challenges. But I could have never imagined how the year would unfold and the profound impact digital technology would have on our daily lives.


Eight months into the pandemic, I made a purchase from 22 & Lou, where owner Laura Freel makes jams and marmalades out of her home kitchen in Toronto. Laura’s preserves had been flying off local market shelves, but with sudden store closures, she quickly realized that to keep her business alive, she’d have to start selling online. With no previous experience, she signed up for Digital Main Street’s ShopHERE powered by Google program, was paired with a Canadian student to build her website, and in a matter of weeks, her business was back up and running.


Laura’s is just one of the many stories of resilience I’ve heard from business owners across the country. And it’s a story we’re proud to be a part of. Today I’m sharing an update on how our teams worked alongside Canadian businesses and local organizations to support our country’s economic recovery. 

Statistics about digital skills in Canada

Helping Canadian businesses bounce back

We knew it was critical to get small businesses online quickly. That’s why in May, we invested $1 million to expand the ShopHERE program, and made a pledge to get 50,000 Canadian small businesses online. The program is currently operating in nearly 450 municipalities, and will continue to expand across the country, helping businesses like 22 & Lou start selling online. 


More than 1.5 million Canadians have visited our Small Business Hub, which provides the tools needed to get online, connect with customers and build digital skills. We made it free for Canadian retailers to list their products on the Google Shopping tab. And to help businesses keep up with the demand for e-commerce, we delivered Google Ads training through Skillshop and Google Academy, and worked with partners like the Retail Council of Canada, Export Development Canada, Startup Canada and Business Development Bank of Canada to deliver free virtual training to over 20,000 Canadian entrepreneurs.

Giving back to local communities 

But it’s not just about businesses, we are just as committed to helping the communities in which we live and work. As part of our COVID-19 local response, our Canadian sites donated over $800,000 in Community Grants through our philanthropic arm, Google.org. The organizations that received grants, such as Region Ready, Toronto Public Library Foundation, Kids Code Jeunesse and the Ottawa Food Bank, address critical areas of need, like food insecurity, connectivity, education and PPE for frontline health workers. Through the gift match program Google offers employees annually, Canadian Googlers have raised $1.6 million for organizations in their communities and around the world.

Digital skills training for the future of work

We need to better align the skills of the Canadian workforce with the jobs of the future. This year we transformed our free Grow with Google training to virtual formats and have trained more than 80,000 Canadians on digital skills. With school closures, we trained more than 10,000 Canadian teachers in G Suite for Education, to help them adapt to teaching from home. We also funded community organizations that do critical work to boost digital skills. Google.org announced  a $2.5 million grant for NPower Canada, to go toward IT training for 1,700 young adults from underrepresented groups. The first cohort graduated in September, and over half of the graduates have already secured employment just three months post-training. Last week, Google.org announced a $250,000 grant to ComIT, to provide free IT training to 450 Indigenous learners across Canada.

Supporting tech in Canada

We’ll continue our expansion plans to build new offices in Toronto, Montreal and Waterloo. To strengthen our support for the broader tech ecosystem, we launched two accelerators for Canadian startups. Collectively, the Google for Startups Accelerator Canada and Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders have enrolled 14 Canadian startups. We’ve also renewed our commitment to Canada’s AI ecosystem with an additional $3.5+ million grant to Mila, the world’s largest deep learning research institute based in Québec.  

In a year that has brought about many changes for us all, the pandemic is one thing we all have in common. And collaboration has been our strongest resource. As we all move increasingly online to find products and services, digitization is clearly the next driver of sustained growth for our country.  But we can’t do it alone. We’ll continue to work alongside businesses, local organizations and nonprofits into 2021 and beyond. 

Google.org supports Latino SMBs this holiday season

When I think about small businesses, I think about my family. My uncle runs a small freight forwarding business in South Florida. My cousin works at a family-owned Peruvian restaurant. And my father-in-law is a serial entrepreneur who has run a hair salon, a construction company, and an outdoor food court over the years. These small businesses have been a lifeline for my family, and provided opportunities for us to succeed in this country. 


Small businesses are the backbone of families like mine and the U.S. economy as a whole. It’s critical that we come together to support these pillars of local communities, especially for historically underserved groups, like the Latino community, which have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Latinos are 1.5 times more likely to start a business, but in the past few months alone about 32% of Latino-owned businesses have been forced to close due to COVID-19. 


In September, Google.org announced a $3 million grant to Hispanics in Philanthropy PowerUp Fund to directly support Latino-owned small businesses across California, Texas and New York. Through this effort, 500 small businesses were selected and will receive $5,000 in cash grants as well as a year's worth of business training from Ureeka, a community-based platform that connects underserved small business owners to peers, mentors and coaches, to help these businesses grow. We’re optimistic that through cash and training like this, small businesses will be able to build the resilience they need to withstand economic downturns, especially during the holidays. 


The PowerUp Fund grant recipients represent more than 55 industries including food and beverage, health and wellness, childcare, technology and more. Nearly 60 percent of these businesses are Latina-owned and more than 15 percent of business owners identify as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, a U.S. veteran or persons with disabilities. We asked recipients to share how this support will help keep the lights on, here’s what some of them had to say: 


  • Gisselle Hernandez, CEO of Glamlite Cosmetics

    Gisselle Hernandez, CEO of Glamlite Cosmetics

    Gisselle Hernandez founded Glamlite Cosmetics, a food inspired cosmetics brand. Giselle is a Caribbean immigrant that lives by the motto: "beauty isn't one-size-fits-all." Our brand is grateful to be one of recipients of this outstanding support from the PowerUp Fund,” says Gisselle. “Through the Ureeka coaching we will continue to learn how to use social media to expand our audience and create engaging content for our current customers.”


  • Alejandro Cuadra, owner of Urban Barber College

    Alejandro Cuadra, owner ofUrban Barber College 

    Urban Barber College prepares students to become licensed professionals within the beauty industry. “This funding and coaching will help bring some stability in this very unpredictable year,” said Alejandro.“I can look forward to growth and sustainability with the opportunity to learn from a Ureeka business coach.” 


  • Laura Bruce, Director of Mi Casa Es Tu Casa

    Laura Bruce, Director ofMi Casa Es Tu Casa 

    Mi Casa Es Tu Casa offers highly-rated online baby and toddler music classes to teach Spanish through music, sign language, and games. “The PowerUp funding and coaching from Ureeka will help us have a solid plan to move forward with our small business by setting our priorities straight, recover from the damages done by COVID-19, and have a more efficient business strategy to make 2021 our best year yet,” says Laura. 


  • Joe Melig, Co-owner of 2M Smokehouse

    Joe Melig, Co-owner of 2M Smokehouse

    2M Smokehouse is one of the most popular barbeque and catering restaurants in San Antonio. “With all the uncertainty that lies ahead for small business owners, this grant is helping us by allowing us to make the necessary improvements and adjustments during these ever-changing times,” says Joe. “However, it is the support brought to us through the coaching course and a sense of community with fellow business owners that will last a lifetime.” 


  • Carmen Rodriguez, CEO of Brooklyn Cupcake

    Carmen Rodriguez and Gina Madera, Founders of Brooklyn Cupcake

    Brooklyn Cupcake is a family owned and operated cupcake shop with a menu of Puerto Rican and Italian inspired cupcakes. “We’ve seen a spike in our internet shipping since the start of the pandemic,” says Carmen. “This grant will go towards building a much needed shipping department so that we can capture every single sale and continue to grow our shipping platform.”


  • Javier Castaño, Director of QueensLatino

    Javier Castaño, Director of QueensLatino 

    Queens Latino is a monthly bilingual newspaper that provides  local news from Queens, New York—one of the most diverse regions in the U.S. "COVID-19 has transformed New York City’s Latino community,” says Javier.  “In response to the disruptive impacts the QueensLatino community-based platform has endeavored to report on the systemic socio-economic dislocations–thus contributing to reactivating the local economy. This grant money will be used to pay reporters, videographers, and acquire new technologies. The coaching will assist in making our newsroom more robust, strengthen our business strategy and help us navigate the digital ecosystem and develop new perspectives that will ensure growth and prosperity."


Google.org’s funding for the PowerUp Fund builds on Google’s $180M commitment to support minority and women-led small businesses across the country through the Grow with Google Small Business Fund and Google.org grants. Read on to learn more about the other PowerUp Fund recipients and consider supporting a small business this holiday season— whether it’s buying your favorite candle from the shop around the corner or giving a shout out to your go-to dinner spot on social media—every little bit counts. 


Googler volunteers teach (and learn) important lessons

The COVID-19 pandemic has made distance learning the default option for many school-age children around the world. But many students, especially those in underserved communities, still aren’t familiar with using technology to learn.


Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to help address this challenge as a Google volunteer mentoring with Ini Budi, a nonprofit organization in Indonesia that creates digital learning materials for teachers and students. This volunteering opportunity was part of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public’s Changemaker Journey program, supported by Google.org and aimed at helping nonprofits get the tools, knowledge and skills to meet their immediate priorities and sustain their efforts over the long term. 


It was really rewarding to work with Indi Budi’s team to help them develop a learning hub using YouTube, and teach staff members how to use Google’s analytics tools to see how engaged students were with their classes. But what surprised me most was just how much I gained from the experience. 


Despite being the mentor, I felt I was learning from the Ini Budi team as much as they were learning from me. I started to better understand the challenges the education sector faced, and how we can begin to tackle these systemic issues. I realized that you can solve any problem with the power of collaboration. 


I want to highlight a few other Googlers who have been dedicating their time as mentors to help various Google.org grantees and show how helping others can lead you to learn more about yourself. 

Pat Choa

Pat Choa, gTech Ads Operations Director, Philippines

Being Filipino, I want local businesses to succeed, so I signed up to be a mentor to Filipino startups through a local enterprise, QBO Innovation Hub. 

Tapping my media and digital marketing knowledge, I reviewed these startups' media plans and shared my perspective on using digital platforms to grow their businesses. 

These group mentoring sessions made me feel like I was part of a broader community, where I, too, was learning from these startups’ challenges, motivations and ideas.

Talking to these entrepreneurs and hearing what they're trying to achieve brings me so much joy— just knowing that there are so many businesses trying to create better opportunities for other Filipinos inspires me to strive to do more to help my own community.

Brian Weidenbaum, Software Engineer, Singapore

I had the chance to be a hackathon mentor to pre-college students working on exciting software ideas at Engineering Good, a Singaporean nonprofit that empowers disadvantaged communities through engineering.

Brian Weidenbaum

Our hackathon team worked on a feature to make it easier for visually-impaired people to read screens that lack integrated screen readers. 


I was deeply impressed by how motivated the students were and how quickly they picked up machine learning techniques to create a prototype. Watching them build some compelling features in such a short period of time was inspiring, and seeing their idea come to life during the hackathon was a proud moment for me. Volunteering is such a great way to serve the community and, in this case, to help build the next generation of engineers. I want the engineers of the future to be more skilled than I am, and I am happy to see what people are capable of when you invest in them.

Max Tsai, Google Customer Solutions Direct Sales Lead, Taiwan  

I spent the last few months volunteering with the Institute for Information Industry, a local nonprofit that supports the development of the information industry in Taiwan.

Max Tsai

I was tasked with designing and developing a series of webinars to help local businesses gain new knowledge on topics like finding the right talent for building a great workplace culture. 

Together with five other Google volunteers, we were able to produce three webinars, with more sessions to come in the coming weeks. 

More than 900 entrepreneurs attended these sessions, with many reaching out to share how useful our insights and tips were. 

Through this experience, I learned how valuable knowledge-sharing sessions could be. It felt good knowing that we had this opportunity to use our skills to help these organizations as they continue to evolve.