As Vice President of Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Business Services division, Samantha Owen provides consultancy service for corporations looking for guidance on how to spend their philanthropic dollars wisely. She speaks with The PIE about non-profit partnerships, scholarship programmes and addressing a dearth of emerging STEM talent.
The PIE: So Samantha, please tell us about who you work for.
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?
SO: It is a huge problem, particularly in California and particularly in Silicon Valley. We are not getting enough people through the education system with the skills that they need to be able to get the jobs that the companies in the valley have got. In some cases they are having to bring in employees from overseas. Many are coming in from across Asia and India and it’s really concerning for people locally and families with children locally. This is where the opportunities are in this field and we just don’t have whether it’s the resources, the interest or the support – why it I such an issue but it really is.
Silicon Valley is clearly a bit of a different scenario because so much of the local economy revolves around that industry but it is a big problem across the US as well.
The PIE: Is there a lot of activity in the US to try and engage more STEM-led students?
“Trying to get women into STEM has become particularly challenging”
SO: Yes, they are trying at every level through the education system. We partner with a number of non-profits that are trying to get hands-on science learning to children right at very earliest stages of their educational career. One organisation, RAFT (Resource Area for Teaching), is all about getting children excited about [science].
We actually hosted an event about Women in STEM for our clients and had someone from NASA come in to talk. Part of the problem is there are not sufficient role models in the press and the women often in science fields presented in media are often a bit nerdy… trying to get women into that field has become particularly challenging.
The PIE: Are there any particular countries where your clients are keen to embed their brands?
SO: When you look at a network like the Cisco academies they are really expanding across India and Asia and seeing a great deal of success there. When you look at the demographics, certainly from my experience being an expat living in Silicon Valley, there are a lot of people from those countries coming in.
“We are certainly doing a lot more in Africa and I see that being an area of big growth”
The PIE: Are you given any mandate in terms of where you should go and develop partnerships?
SO: Part of it is driven by ‘where are there opportunities for them to sell more of their products?’, obviously, and part of is it ‘where can we really make a difference?’ so we are certainly doing a lot more in Africa and I see that being an area of big growth. Also in South America as well, a number of countries there are really focusing on entrepreneurism and encouraging that as a way of really driving and boosting economies. That is something that we have seen really taking off in Brazil for example, so BRIC countries are where we see the most amount of opportunity but we help our clients wherever they need us to help them.
