SO: I work for Silicon Valley Community Foundation based out of Mountain View in California.

“We work with over 100 companies with many names from the tech industry that you have heard of”

I was invited [to Going Global’s 2014 conference] today to talk about the role that philanthropy and business can play in opening up access to higher education. I am the VP of our business services department so I am responsible for overseeing all of the community work we do with corporations. We work with over 100 companies with many names from the tech industry that you have heard of.

The PIE: Can you give us some examples?

SO: I can – we work with Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, EA (who do sports games), and JC Penney… so a lot of the big tech companies and, through a partnership with another organisation, a number of companies outside the tech industry as well.

The PIE: So what you are doing is to enable students from overseas to come in to work with tech companies?

SO: What we truly do is help our corporations be more strategic in how they use their philanthropic dollars. So in terms of any money set aside from charitable purposes, they work with us to identify where that money can be going. For many of them, their primary focus area is education and for many of them it is STEM education in particular. So we help and shepherd them through the process of understanding what the needs are locally and globally and finding out who are the right partners that they should be working with. We also assist with many scholarship programmes for companies like SanDisk and a number of our individual donors at the foundation also have their own scholarship programmes, so we help students get access to education by partnering with these donors.

The PIE: When students finish their scholarship programmes is there any sort of tie to a company – ie. an internship?

“We shepherd corporations through the process of understanding what the needs are locally and globally”

SO: Some companies do have those opportunities. The rules around scholarships are very strict. For some companies it does work like that and for some they have other ways that students can get involved. Cisco is one of our big clients and they have their networking academies which are all over the world. We manage kind of the back office side of that for them, but that’s really encouraging students to learn about the needs within networking and get qualifications, and to give them the skills to be able to either set up their own businesses that will require the equipment that Cisco sells or to go on and work for Cisco.

So really our role is just helping them identify who are the right partners to work with and how can we really help them make a difference in education, both locally and wherever they have offices around the world.

The PIE: And who might they partner with overseas; universities and institutions directly?

SO: Yes – a number of our clients partner directly with universities to offer scholarship programmes or there are other ways for their employees to be involved; mentoring, for example. They also work with non-profits directly. It really varies. Certainly on the back of attending Going Global for the first time, I’m getting lots of ideas for maybe how some of the companies could partner a bit more closely with some of the universities, particularly in terms of making sure that students are getting the skills they need to really be career-ready and job-ready, because that is one of the big themes here.

The PIE: And in terms of the STEM issue in the US, how big is the problem?