Tech Giving Back Missoula: A discussion with the Montana High Tech Business Alliance, the United Way of Missoula County and Missoula Economic Partnership
The pandemic has sparked many new tech-related needs across Montana. Challenges like:
Connecting kids to online school
Delivering mental health services virtually
Building software to efficiently allocate available resources
Every day, our members use technology to find creative solutions to hard problems. You have already helped in so many ways, such as making masks, offering pro bono services, and giving financially.
On Wednesday, June 3 at 11 am, we held the second of three virtual events to learn about opportunities to help locally. This discussion will focus on needs in Missoula County, but guests from across the state are encouraged to join the conversation.
Library Hotspot Lending Program
Coronavirus Relief Grant Application
Full Transcript:
Christina: Welcome, I am Christina Henderson, Executive Director of the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. Welcome to our discussion, Missoula Tech Giving Back: a discussion with the United Way of Missoula County and Missoula Economic Partnership. Today's event will focus on needs in Missoula County, but we have guests joining us from all across Montana. And even though we have a special emphasis on education today, this Tech Giving Back initiative is intended to encompass a wide range of needs in our community. This event is part of a series of virtual events the Alliance is hosting during COVID-19. You can find details on upcoming events at mthightech.org/webinars. We also have recordings and transcripts of past events, including our Bozeman Tech Giving Back event on May 20. Today's webinar is co hosted by the Missoula Economic Partnership and United Way of Missoula County. Grant Kier, CEO of the Missoula Economic Partnership, is going to give an introduction to help frame our discussion. Susan Hay Patrick, CEO of the United Way of Missoula County, will offer a short presentation on the nonprofit community. And then we will have two five-minute lightning talks from Tom Sturgis at ATG, a Cognizant Company ,and Jann Butler from onX about ways their companies are giving back to the community. After that, we will hear about techniques in the Missoula County Public Schools with Rae Cooper, Director of Technology, and Hatton Littman, Communications Director. Katie Moore, CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Missoula County will also share about techniques related to her work. For the second portion of the meeting, we will open the floor for discussion with the audience. We have some Montana companies present who are doing amazing work in Montana schools. For example, Northwestern Energy has set up solar panels and STEM education classes across Missoula Edulog is leveraging technology to bus children safely to school across the globe. And Cushing Terrell is working with educators across the country to envision what schools and classrooms can look like in the future. We would ask the audience to mute your microphones until you have something to say. If you have a question or comments to share during the meeting, you can type it in the chat box or turn on your microphone. I would now like to turn the floor over to Grant to get us started.
Grant: Good morning, everyone. I want to start by thanking Christina and recognizing her leadership with the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. I'm confident that today's conversation will lead to meaningful outcomes and impacts in our community, ones that wouldn't have happened without her initiative. For those of you attending from the tech sector today, I want to assure you of two things. First, we know you already deeply engage in supporting our community and nonprofits. Some of you are already doing great work to support education, specifically. Some of you who are investors and members of MEP. Wherever you're engaged, I'm grateful for your leadership, and the work you do to perpetuate the culture of giving back in Missoula. It's what makes this a wonderful place to live for our whole community. Today, we're excited to potentially expand that engagement around critical and timely needs related to COVID-19. Second, We know that many of you and your colleagues' lives and businesses have been disrupted and deeply impacted by COVID, and for some in devastating ways. For you to be here today ready to help others is extraordinary and to me reflects the spirit of being a Missoulian. If you're watching, and not just listening on Zoom today, you may be able to tell from my background that I'm working from home. I'm not working from home because our office is closed. I'm working from home because my 11-year old daughter is on the other side of that bookcase doing her schoolwork right now and waiting to start a Zoom violin lesson. There's really no way for me to return to work outside of my home until I know I have a safe, healthy, nurturing, and stimulating place to send her every day. And based on data from Missoula's own Harvard trading economist Bryce Ward, about 25% of our workforce is in the same boat. Unfortunately, it's not the same 25% who have jobs that allow them to work from home. MEPs mission is focused on a healthy economy and a prosperous community. Our present charge is to assist in leading our community's economic recovery. There's no question in my mind that even at the best of times, education is one of the most important issues and challenges we face as a community and one of the smartest place we can invest our resources. However, right now during COVID-19, addressing challenges and barriers to education may be the best way to provide a great future for our children while also providing the fastest and smoothest path forward to a safe and equitable economic recovery that benefits every business and person in Missoula. So on behalf of the entire board and staff at MEP, we are thrilled that today's conversation is taking place, and we're honored to be a part of the conversation. And despite all of my passionate enthusiasm for the topic, I also know I am not an expert in the area of education. I know that without good guides, I am just as likely to dive into this and break something as I am likely to show up and fix something that's broken. Luckily, I have a friend and we all have a colleague in Susan Hay Patrick, CEO United Way of Missoula County, who is deeply connected to this issue and to many of the leaders who are addressing the challenges in education. She's been able to find a great group of experts to help us understand the challenges today, and where help is needed most. With that I'm thrilled to turn things over to Susan.
Susan: Thanks, Grant. Thanks, Christina. And thanks to all of you for being here today. And thanks, Danny for showing my slides. So United Way of Missoula County's mission is to build a better community for everybody, especially focusing on the areas of education, financial stability, and health. Ben Franklin said that the secret to a good life was to be healthy, wealthy and wise. And those are very much United Way values. Next slide please. We house, lead, and/or staff and fund several community-wide collective impact focused initiatives that are decreasing childhood obesity, reducing suicide, starting children on the path to lifelong learning, ending homelessness, strengthening local nonprofits, improving outcomes for children zero to five and their families, and helping our community better prepare for and recover from disasters. Next slide. Nonprofits have a big footprint in Missoula County in terms of economic impact. You heard at last month's presentation about the impact of the sector on our state. In Missoula County alone, we have an estimated economic impact of $1.2 billion dollars. I'm sure that many of you have heard that Missoula County has more nonprofits per capita than any other city in the country. It's not really true. It's not that hard to file for nonprofit status. But many organizations do that and then never hire staff, never raise money, never sponsor any programs. But if you count just the nonprofits that pay wages and file a 990 tax return with the IRS, that limits it to 250 nonprofits. Is that a lot? It is, but imagine Missoula without places like Missoula Art Museum, Missoula Food Bank, St. Patrick Hospital, the Humane Society, United Way of Missoula County. Nonprofits are such a part of what makes our community so vibrant and such a great place to live, work, and play.
COVID-19 has emphasized what we do well and what our weaknesses are. We have been at the center of our community's response to COVID-19. But we are also very fragile. And I will also add that we're nimble, we have the ability to move quickly. My own organization pivoted immediately at the beginning of the pandemic and was able to raise over the last 10 weeks about a half a million dollars, most of which we've distributed, and that's a tribute to the nimbleness of our sector. Sectors current needs are balanced between the urgency of now and the need to transform our institutions and systems with the goal of increasing our impact and strengthening our community's resilience. It's hard with the demands of now to redesign our systems and institutions during a pandemic but the most enlightened and forward thinking nonprofits and systems are looking at the horizon. And that includes Missoula County Public Schools, who you'll hear for from shortly. One of our United Way initiatives is the Missoula Nonprofit Center. It's a membership organization of 100 very diverse nonprofits. We bring them together for training, education, networking, information sharing, and we recently surveyed them about their techniques. And as you can see, it's a mix of hardware and software infrastructure, and one time web help, and what do they need? They need money, they need training. And if you'd like to have a copy of the full survey, please reach out to me and we'd be happy to share it with you. You'll also hear later from one of our Missoula Nonprofit Center members Katie Moore, CEO of Boys and Girls Club of Missoula, who is one of our sector's most talented and visionary leaders, and she has identified an issue in her organization that technology could help with. I know I gave a very quick overview of United Way programs and initiatives, if any of those mentioned resonate with you, please be in touch. I guarantee you there's a nonprofit who could use your good heads and big hearts. And with that, Christina?
Christina: Thank you, Susan. All right, and just a quick reminder to our folks in attendance, mute your microphone please until you have something to say. And next I would like to introduce our first lightning talk from a technology company, Tom Stergios, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development for ATG, a Cognizant company will share ways that ATG is giving back to the community. Tom?
Tom: Thank you, Christina. And thank you for your thoughtful words, Grant and Susan. Pleased to be with you all and talk a little bit about ATG. For those of you who don't know, ATG is a technology company. Our largest office is in Missoula, Montana. We've got about 215 employees here, but we also have employees in Bozeman, Helena, Anaconda, Kalispell, and all up and down the Bitterroot and other areas surrounding Missoula County. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about two things, one some of our giveback programs historically, and then some of the things that we're thinking about during COVID. And, you know, historically, our philanthropic mission is technology education in western Montana. And so we have two thrusts, the first is K-12 Education. And we view this as investing in our future quite simply, right? You know, K-12 Education in Missoula is outstanding. But I think we could all say that in the areas of STEM and particularly girls in STEM that we need to step up our game not just as a country, but you know, locally as well. So programs around education and particularly technology in education, and particularly girls and technology in education in K through 12 are a huge focus area for us. Also, we'd be remiss without talking about the University of Montana, right in our backyard. The success story of ATG is really a success story of a partnership with University of Montana. And so our relationship has evolved through the years and is very tight, both in terms of time, talent, and treasure in working with our local K-12, as well as the University of Montana. And what that shows up in is, is we've got a philanthropy budget of about $80,000 a year. And I would say probably three quarters of that goes to education and education-related goals. So some of that was, you know, targeted very specifically. So $25,000 is going to a fellowship for the future of work trying to tie together technology with interdisciplinary groups within the University of Montana, what does philosophy have to say for artificial intelligence, as a simple example of things that we're trying to look at. What does journalism look like? What does Creative Writing look like in future jobs and as technology and education begin to evolve over time. And that was before COVID. And now, like many things, COVID is just putting an exclamation point on this, on anything that we were previously working on.
And so, you know, but it's not just money. I think that what we like to do is make sure my team is passionate about working with nonprofits in working in the classroom, whether that's with Spectrum and the SOX program with fourth graders, or lecturing at the University of Montana, or going to career fairs at Montana State. And so the team is passionate about working with youth, working with education, and so backing up not just our, our checkbook, but with elbow grease, and, you know, we're finding ourselves on many of the boards and by the way, I would put this out if anybody's looking for board members, there's hard-charging leaders within ATG that are looking to get back to their communities as individuals as well. Also, this year ATG was acquired by Cognizant. So historically, we had been building up our war chest for philanthropy, and Cognizant really just accelerated that. It's nice to be part of the 194th largest company in the world. Cognizant is really looking at Missoula, Montana, as a real innovation consciousness--300,000 employees and they're looking to our state because we are so organized. With everything from grants to support job growth, to ability to work and collaborate with education, from K-university in unique ways, and so very much they're looking at us as a guiding light for other Cognizant locations around the world. And then finally, with COVID, you know, we couldn't do all the normal things that we do, which is support all the local eateries and drinkeries around town. But we took that and we did adopt a business, right. And so, fortunately, most businesses were able to at least maintain. We've provided over $10,000 to local establishments, that could be a toy store, because we've got, you know, tons of parents with kids going crazy and just, you know, provide them some toys and educational toys for their children to the local breweries and local restaurants just to try to provide, you know, some impetus for ATG and in some cases, we pointed our efforts towards healthcare workers, but to help keep as many restaurants afloat and just make sure that everybody knows that there's people that are thinking about them and trying to help. And now we have two things. We have a pandemic, and we have social unrest. So we're, you know, looking at different ways that we can tangibly work with the community on each of those. And I think our ability to be virtual and leverage technology platforms, the coin phrases. Now more than ever, these things that we have been doing historically, we need to double down and be able to provide better technology solutions for education. And as things hopefully begin to get back to normal, we can go to some of our old things that always worked for us in the past, but we're going to need to invent some new things going forward. So I'll probably cap it at that but I appreciate everybody listening to a little bit about ATG and Cognizant. Christina, I'll throw it back to you.
Christina: Thank you, Tom. Now we'd like to invite Jann Butler, the VP of people for onX maps to say a few words about what their company is doing.
Jann: Tom is always a tough act to follow. You guys, he has really set the bar over there for other companies to step up to. So appreciate that. And I am anxious to hear more about what you're doing for the restaurants because I'm also concerned about, you know, our people we're eating out quite a bit and when you're working from home or not, so some of those things are kind of interesting to me. As well as the social unrest part as it relates to Missoula. I would love to connect with you on that topic as well. Anyway, for those who don't know, I think people do know, but onX is really a kind of a mid stage startup, focused on outdoor maps to empower outdoor experiences. We started as a hunt company, but this year we launched our second product into Offroad. We are one of the lucky ones. Our business has continued to do well and thrive through the COVID-19 situation with the push for more people to want to be outside. We're at a point where we're going to pass the 200 employee mark within the next month. And right now, the majority of our people except for a few essential IT folks, and so on and so forth, are working from home, including hiring and onboarding remotely. We do have a number of people in the queue to move to Missoula as soon as the moving truck can get to them in places like New York City. So we do have that going on. The majority of our employees are located in Missoula. We do have an office in Bozeman as well as remote employees throughout the United States. onX has a really extremely strong history of really grassroots volunteerism in a donation program, pretty scrappy. Every employee gets eight hours of volunteer time a year, and in the past, we've done things like Habitat for Humanity, Clark Fork River cleanup, people volunteering at local kids camps, candemonium. And then really interesting this last Christmas, we had a lot of people who had relocated into the Missoula area, and were alone on Christmas and they banded together and went and served food at Poverello Center, which I thought was awesome for a number of reasons but people weren't alone, too. As far as donations, in the past we have had, a wide variety of things. Obviously, we give a lot to the food bank, that's a big thing for us. Women in Tech is one of our focus areas. And also we partnered in Bozeman, for example, we have Map Brewing who created a beer in honor of our 10th anniversary, and we donated $1 for every pint served and directed it toward a public land initiative. In the COVID 19 situation, I think our employees feel very blessed that they are in a situation where our workforce hasn't been impacted. We have had people who have, you know, have their spouse laid off from another tech company or in some way their work has been impacted. But, so one of the things that came up is we started talking about, hey, what can we do in addition to our regular giving program, and so it came up to donate PTO, so we had employees donate up to a week of PTO, and that money was directed toward three agencies, United Way of Missoula, Missoula Council on Aging, and HRDC in Bozeman, plus some of our remote employees gave to Food Banks in their local area. That was a pretty popular program. I think that if I would say anything about our giving in our corporate donation program, it is kind of scrappy and small. I actually think we should get it a little bit more directed. You know, kind of figure out what our key things are, if it's, you know, STEM education or whatever that is. So I think that as we grow, we're moving to that. I think we are as a company just in general for volunteer hours or donations. We're trying to figure out how to address the social unrest situation, which, while Missoula is not quite as diverse as some other places, people are still deeply affected by what's happening in in the world and in our country, and so I think it's very healthy in an organization and Tom could probably say this too. If you can help your employees get active, and figure that out, I think it's a healthy thing. So that's what we have going out. I'm super excited to hear about the education part going out. So, thank you.
Christina: Thank you, Jann. Now we'd like to turn the floor over to our partners in education. First up, we have Rae Cooper, Director of Technology for Missoula County Public Schools and Hatton Littman, Communications Director for Missoula County Public Schools to talk to us about technology in the schools.
Hatton: Good morning. It's nice to see some friendly faces out there. I'm Hatton Littman, I'm the Communications Director for Missoula County Public Schools, where our mission is to ensure that every single student achieves their potential, regardless of their circumstances or ability. Just a quick highlight about Missoula County Public Schools. We are the largest school district in Missoula County, yet we are not the only school district in Missoula County, there are actually 11 independent K-eight school districts. So one thing that is really common is people will think Hellgate Elementary, that must be part of the same school district as the rest of the world. That is not the case. We have three urban high schools, one rural High School and one alternative high school. We have three middle schools, nine elementary schools and one Early Learning Center. We really do value being a forward thinking and high achieving school district and you can see that we really believe in a 21st century educational culture. That said, even in times like these, our teachers and our students experienced great challenges in the midst of a crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to shift to a fully remote learning environment. With that, I'm going to kick it over to my colleague Rae Cooper, who will take it from here.
Rae: All right, good morning. Like Hatton said, I'm Rae Cooper. I'm the Director of Technology for Missoula County Public Schools and boy, a great time to be a tech director in the midst of a global pandemic. So I will certainly share some of the challenges that Missoula County Public Schools has endured during the shift to remote learning. First of all, that shift to remote learning in about a week's time was definitely a challenge. We needed to prepare our teachers teachers, needed to figure out what curriculum worked online. We had to engage with software companies about purchasing more licenses or obtaining licenses for free to be able to shift to remote work. We had to prepare our students and our families to make that big shift. And we had to distribute devices to our students in about one week. The next thing that was definitely a challenge would be just student access to devices and the internet. We have a lot of devices in our district, but we don't have all mobile devices. So we have a lot of computer labs, especially at our high school level. So we needed to distribute mobile devices, like laptops and Chromebooks and additionally provide some hotspots for Internet access for our students. At the same time, the whole world was trying to obtain these devices, so that was a bit challenging. We have a definite need for reliable internet access, especially in East Missoula, where we serve about 160 students. We also had some challenges for our staff to have access to laptops. Not all of our staff devices across the district are laptops, some are desktops, so we needed to make sure our staff had laptops with webcams so that they could deliver instruction to students and see their students. As well as staff needing reliable internet. They live in different parts of Missoula County and not every part is covered by really great internet. Another challenge would be communication. So in thinking about having teachers and staff members call families, they were using their personal phones and masking their phone numbers and then having some trouble connecting when parents or families didn't answer because the call is showing a blocked caller ID. So that was definitely a challenge and then communicating with our families that are English language learners, we had to find some creative software solutions in order to be able to text communication COVID-related updates in their native language. We've incurred some educational software class, a lot of edtech companies provided free software subscriptions through the summer, but we know that we're going to incur there, they're going to stop making those free for the fall.
And then we also have some legislation in Montana, the Online Student Data Privacy Act, where we needed to make sure that our teachers weren't using all sorts of software without getting those data privacy agreements in place first. And then last, equity. We always hear about the digital divide with devices and internet access, but it does go a bit deeper than that. Our students and families were not accustomed, especially our youngest learners, they were not prepared to be productive and learn online. So this is a big shift in education and a big part of the technology gap that not everyone was talking about right now. So I just talked about a slew of challenges that we faced in this short amount of time. And so how can you help MCPS? These are some of our immediate needs: to be able to provide every MCPS student with a Chromebook, we need about 4,800 more devices--that equates to $1.1 million. So that's, that's definitely a big ask. But it would definitely help us think about the learners that may need to still be at home next fall or whatever COVID looks like in August, but we know that a portion of our population will probably still need to be at home because they're medically fragile or they have someone in their family that is vulnerable. Being one to one in this district would help because then we're not sharing devices and having to clean them in between student use. We know that we have families that need reliable internet. And we know that there is a specific need in East Missoula, where we have about 160 students. We know that we are going to need more funding support for software because moving curricula online, definitely has a cost. We know that those resources were free, but they're not going to be free next year. So just thinking about our student libraries, I predict that we're not going to be able to have students checking out books in our physical library, so we're going to have to move a lot of those, we're gonna have to shift to ebooks and ebook subscriptions. Just for one platform I was looking at, for example, it was $30,000 for a district. So there are many, many more things I could talk about. But those are some of the immediate financial needs. I believe Hatton is going to talk to you about other ways you can help.
Hatton: Thanks so much Rae. So other ways that people already help, and I appreciate that Grant and Susan both mentioned ways that the tech sectors already engaged in our schools and our buildings, but certainly long term engagement with students via mentorship opportunities, job shadows. I want to give an example, I know that Cushing Terrell was mentioned by Christina in terms of their leadership in education and design, but we also have a significant number of Cushing Terrell employees who act as mentors to our high school robotics team. We also have ATG employees that are doing it and a variety of others. Keep in mind that in the state of Montana, the Missoula County Public High School's robotics team is the only first level competition team in the entire state of Montana. So having those high tech mentors who are doing that long range relationship building is a big deal for our students. We have technology employees serving as mentors in our coding clubs. We have senior projects that every student at Big Sky High School completes and oftentimes there's a business mentor involved there. And our finance pathway and our Health Science Academy at two of our high schools also have extensive relationships between students, teachers and businesses. So those are other ways you can get involved. I just want to highlight and put something into perspective, Rae mentioned that to close that gap and get one to one devices would be $1.1 million. Our tech levy is just a little bit larger than that. And our tech levy is what has to pay for everything our district does with regard to technology. So that's internet service devices, software, professional development, things like that. It helps put into perspective, what it would take to close the gap on that 1.1 million, there's not a lot of extra dollars hanging out there. I also want to highlight that Missoula County Public Schools is also giving back in ways that you heard our tech executives talk about during the COVID-19 stay at home orders and closures our administrators within the school district contributed to what we called our Day's Pay fundraiser. And every administrator contributed funds, which we sent to the United Way Emergency Assistance Fund, and we were really proud to do that. So you know, I just mentioned the ways that local businesses have been engaged and I just want to highlight them again and say thank you. We so appreciate it. And I want to say the thing that we know in education and I think everybody knows is that high quality education leads to that high quality standard of living in our community. It helps Grant attract businesses to our community. It helps all of you keep your employees happy, and keep our workforce strong and coming into all of your workplaces. If anybody wants me to share these slides, I can. This is a quick look at how you can find us on the web, how you can find Rae or I via email and we're more than happy to follow up with any of you. Thank you so much.
Christina: Thank you Hatton and Rae. Now we'd like to feature another one of our community nonprofits that is engaging kids and the community at this important time. Katie Moore from the Boys and Girls Club of Missoula County.
Katie: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate seeing the presentations, especially from the school district. And I want to echo a lot of everything that they're saying. And I really first off want to thank a lot of you all, you all are really great supporters of us and all the nonprofits here in the community. I have been in Missoula for about two years, and this is the most giving community I have ever lived in. And it is really powerful to work in this role here. So thank you for taking the time and sort of hearing about all of this, and thanks for organizing this event. So I can definitely talk a lot about, you know, I'm worried my technology is going to go out at any minute because I'm sitting in my nonprofit office and sort of specific needs we need right now in the nonprofit world with technology. But I was sort of thinking when talking to Susan, thinking about sort of broader infrastructure changes that we could potentially take on that would potentially have a really big impact on our young people here in Missoula. So Boys and Girls Club, just you know, our mantra is When School's Out, Club Is In, and so when kids spend 80% of their waking hours not in school, we're really here to provide an enriching experience for those young people when they're not in the school building. And so in thinking about our young people, you know, we have a lot of out of school time youth programs here in the community, and our kids are being served by a variety of them, right, our kids are going in and out of all of our doors every day. And so we're sort of thinking about how do we create a data technology infrastructure where we can sort of house information about young people? And I recognize that there's a lot of concerns about FERPA and legal aspects of this coming up. But when a young person comes into our doors, we're starting at a blank slate with learning their path, learning their unique circumstances, you're learning what works well with them and how to develop relationships with them, and how to get them what they need every single day. And if we were able to share information among the different youth-serving nonprofits here across Missoula County, that we're all seeing the same kids, we could sort of move faster in our efficiencies for developing relationships with young people and getting them the resources and supports that they need to live really thriving successful lives. And because we don't have information sharing among all of our organizations right now, we're sort of doing the same legwork, right? We're hiring staff that have to find out the exact same information about all of these young people. And then it takes months to get to a point that we could get to in a couple of days with access to this information. But of course this sort of extends in sort of the best scenario well beyond out of school time youth serving organizations and nonprofits, right? Our young people oftentimes are in the mental health services. They potentially are in juvenile justice services, legal services, housing services. And so if we could sort of develop a system, a data infrastructure, and this obviously requires technology and knowledge within this world of how best to do that, to share information about our young people, across all of those different sectors, we would be able to work really in tandem as a community to get that holistic support that we need for our young people to build those really solid, long term lives. And because we're oftentimes, we at Boys and Girls Club feel like we're operating sort of in a silo. It can be a little bit more challenging to figure out how we develop success for each of the young people that we serve at our club, because we know that every single child needs something different, has access to different resources, and has different previous experiences. And if we could do stronger information sharing through data and technology, that would be a really powerful tool that we at Boys and Girls Club would really love to see. And, you know, we see it happening sort of across the country. You know, Providence, Rhode Island has what they call After Zones, and that is them sharing data about young people across all their different afterschool programs. So we're seeing it happening despite the concerns about FERPA and data privacy concerns. But it's an area that I think is really interesting to think about. And it requires someone to kind of be the person who creates that foundation and creates that trust among the different organizations. So that was an area that I think would really help increase efficiency and cost savings so that we can take our really limited resources as a nonprofit, and put them towards serving more young people. So I want to stay sort of within the the timeframe, but I think that that's an area that's always kind of going through my head. And when I thought about the audience here, I unfortunately don't have all of the answers to building that, right? It takes a village to create that system. But having those conversations and thinking about not just in the immediate, in what COVID is doing to our young people right now, but what does this look like in the long term and how do we stop sort of letting a lot of young people fall through the cracks of our systems? How do we create that net to catch every single young person?
Christina: Thank you, Katie. And one of our hopes for this time today is that just bringing these different groups of people together in those nonprofit and educational communities or, you know, economic development partners and our tech companies, is that we can together come up with some innovative solutions to tackle some of these new challenges that are coming up. I'd now like to turn the floor over for discussion with all of our audience members. So based on what you've heard so far, we're interested in what are your thoughts or questions today? And feel free to just turn your microphone on if you would like to say something, and you can also type things into the chat.
Jann: This is Jann, I would like to get the public schools deck sent to me because I'd like to send that over to our onX Gives group. I think it may be where we're under-resourced, or where we haven't figured out how to volunteer tech employees to come over and help schools, nonprofits, that sort of thing. And you know, even in the nonprofit space, some of the help that I understand is needed is anybody who's probably fairly technology savvy could do and I think there would be some energy in our organization to do that. And so I just want to figure out how to make that connection.
Christina: Okay, we can definitely share those slides. And also we have a slide that we'll share at the end of the program that has the contact information for all of our perfect groups today. So that'll be up at the end of the discussion as well. Thank you, Jann.
Susan: I don't have a question but Tom, I just have to want to follow up on our email exchange a few months ago, and we talked about your employees potential interest in serving on boards, and I hear something about it, I want to jump because as I said, there are nonprofits that could use good energy and good thinking from your sector. And we had talked about a Board Boot Camp presentation that we do that talks about board responsibilities, what you can expect as a board member and what is expected of you as a board member, geared for folks who might be new to board service. And if you wanted to talk about a virtual version of that, I'd love to reconnect on that.
Tom: Absolutely, you know, leadership in any field is critical. And I think that, you know, business leadership has been bounced against nonprofit leadership, but I think it's just a win-win for all parties. So yeah, happy to help any way we can. We have probably 20 or 30 people, I think, that are qualified to be on a board that are hard chargers and passionate. It's just about finding the right person in the right passion.
Amelia: This is Amelia from the Montana State Library talking and I'm sorry, I had to come in and out of this meeting. So maybe this was discussed in more detail. And this maybe isn't directly related to anything that I heard in the meeting so far. But just to let you all know, talking about tech, the State Library has used a portion of our CARES Act funds to purchase lending hotspots for public libraries across the state. I don't have a complete list of which libraries are participating but I am going to put into the chat box the website for a hotspot lending program, and they're being shipped out right now, and libraries are still setting them up. But I know that, you know, the digital divide is really being felt these days. And sometimes being able to take home, that little hotspot can be really, really helpful for anybody. So those are still being made available, but just to let you know, to talk with your local library, see what resources they have. Because even though they might not be physically opening, although some of them are opening up recently, there is a lot there that nonprofits and other people working with families and people affected by COVID could potentially leverage and use. So sorry if that's not directly relevant to anything you all have discussed but just as a reminder that is another source of potential internet that people could take home.
Christina: That is a great resource. Thank you, Amelia, and we will share that link when we send out the video and PowerPoints and other resources from the webinar.
Amelia: If anyone has any questions about it and would like to connect with the library, please do just email me. I'll put my email in the chat box as well. I'm more than happy to connect anybody with a library and see what you're interested in.
Christina: Yes, thank you, and totally relevant. Our libraries are such a huge source of support and access to technology for young people and adults across the state. So thank you for that.
Grant: I just have a question for Hatton and Rae. Just thinking about Jann's offer to put forward the slide deck and think about ways to her volunteers or employees could volunteer and support this. I wonder if you could talk a little about the right scale at which to try to coordinate things. And by that, I mean, you've identified that you need $1.1 million for devices so that every child would have a device, my understanding in talking to you is that these devices are Chromebooks. And I guess my observation or talking to teachers is that one of the challenges once students have these devices, and they're in remote places, they might not know how to use them yet. And so getting them up to speed on using the device in a way that is streamlined enough that it's not another barrier to their education, but it really empowers them. And so if you had volunteers willing to help, maybe in summer programs, train kids to use these devices, so by default, we're ready to go back to school and knowing how to use them and confident, is that best deployed, that volunteer work, at the district level, at the teacher level, at the school level, where is the best place to sort of engage to make that change or to engage in that kind of work?
Rae: It's a great question. So one of the reasons we use Chromebooks, especially with our youngest learners, is we have this really nifty program where they can hold up a QR code badge to a Chromebook, and it automatically logs the kids in. So training of our youngest learners is definitely best coming from our actual classroom teachers because they want them to use the devices in a specific way. But I can see the programs that students are attending this summer in preparation for a ramp up back to school that would be an amazing partnership with volunteers and teaching our students how to use the devices appropriately. Hatton, do you want to jump in with any ideas you have?
Hatton: Yeah, I think it's great. So we are racing to be able to share with our staff and with the public some of our alternative school plans, which as you know, have to be incredibly flexible. But one of the plans includes up to two weeks of time in a school prior to school starting with classroom teachers, and that's for our K-eight schools. And in those two weeks, the students who are being nominated to attend are largely those students who we clearly are seeing a gap in skills and content knowledge, or a gap in engagement during this online learning period. And so that ramp up period is the best time to have the extra devices, do some of that really intentional skill building. And I also want to highlight, one thing that we're using as a guiding document for our teachers in instruction is the idea that we're focusing on accelerating learning, not remediating learning and that is a really important philosophy. It may seem silly, but Grant it'll give you a little peek behind the curtains, right, about what educators think about. If you want students to quickly get to their goals by the end of that academic year, the best way to do that is to expose them to a real great level of skills and content and scaffold them and support them where they might be missing something. Rather than say, oh, for September through November next year, we're just going to do a review of everything we missed last year, that will just keep students behind. And so we're really focusing all of our thoughts on accelerating learning, not remediating learning. And so in those two weeks of ramp up, one of those core scaffolded skills is going to be that productivity and ability to use that technology tool. So I've been thinking about the scale of when we need the device and when we need that training in early August.
Christina: Susan, did you have a comment?
Susan: Yeah, I was thinking of Tom's comment about the importance of organizational leadership and something that has plagued the nonprofit sector and is changing slowly but probably not fast enough is the constant pressure to reduce overhead means that we have under-invested in our own capacity historically as a sector. And the importance of folks like you serving on boards, is that you can educate your fellow leaders about technology and investments in training and technology as an essential service that can only increase the capacity. And when we are at a time and we are called upon to do more, many nonprofits feel the pressure to try to do more with less, which is a myth. You can't do more with less. And just as you consider nonprofit service or as you serve on nonprofit boards currently, you would do a real service to those organizations by educating people about, you know, to not live the myth of scarcity and to encourage investments in technology as a way to increase capacity and impact.
Elaine: All of our little schools around Bonner and Clinton, our tech budgets, our tech levy is $20,000 a year and we serve 600 students. So I know TPS needs about a million. But investments of five to 10,000 schools would make a major difference and major impact. We are in the same boat as they are, when we send our devices home, which we have never had to send home before we had to implement the filtering because you can't send devices home with kids without a filter on them. Those things were major budget impacts that were unexpected, unanticipated. So. The COVID crisis has really impacted the smaller schools around the county. And so if you're thinking about making a contribution, remember the smaller schools because you get a lot of bang for your buck. It would be life changing if our budgets have an unexpected influx.
Christina: Thank you for sharing that, Elaine. And maybe while the floor is still open for, you know, general comments and questions, maybe I'll transition us in these last few minutes of the meeting into identifying ways that we could be working together in the future as partners to do some matchmaking of sorts between schools and nonprofits that have needs and companies and tech partners and, and others in the community who might be able to help meet them. So, Elaine, if you could, you know, we can connect after this meeting, and we can get more information about your needs at target range schools as well. But our plan for the High Tech Business Alliance is to start adding a section of our newsletter that's devoted to tech giving back where we could both highlight opportunities that are out there that you know, somebody might see and be able to step up and help meet that need. And also, we could facilitate some programs and things that have been discussed earlier. But we would welcome other suggestions today for how we could serve all of you and keep this initiative and the momentum up in the future so that we don't have a nice conversation today and then not revisit it. But what could we be doing as an ongoing process?
Tom: Yeah, it's funny how these things work. I was just having lunch with two of my top leaders at the Trough that have kids that are just about ready to hit the school system and are eager to impact the community thing. So I'll put you in touch, Elaine, with them and we'll see if they can represent some of your interests with our philanthropy group.
Amelia: This is Amelia again with the State Library and I'm in the dark here because I'm not actually super familiar with the nonprofit world and how partnerships necessarily work. But just something that a lot of libraries have been taking advantage of are the COVID Relief Funds from the Department of Commerce. There's like a two page application that any 501(c)(3) can apply for. So a lot of libraries are applying through their foundation or their friends of library groups. And you just have to say, what you're planning, I think it's grants of $10,000. And it can be used for anything COVID-related. It's a very, very easy application, apparently. So a lot of our libraries have applied for that, and gotten it and use it immediately to help us provide services. And so, I mean, I'm not sure what the status of schools are, but if you know if a nonprofit wanted to partner with the school and kind of inject that money through the grant. I don't I don't know if that's actually possible or if it's even realistic, but just in case you didn't know about that.
Christina: Thank you, Amelia. That's a great resource to explore. And we could also try to create a resource list if folks know of other other things that nonprofits and schools might tap.
Amelia: And I'll try and find that link. And put that in the chat box. Apparently, it really is like a super easy grant application, especially compared to others that people have done. So let me try and find that.
Grant: I guess what I would volunteer, just as a prospective from MEP, two things; one on that funding there, you know, $1.2 billion went to the state for relief and impacts much of that money is not yet been designated. And there are conversations at the leadership level in our community regularly about how to sort of advocate as to where that money should be spent. And so, one thing I would add is if interested business leaders would be encouraged to put more money into education, I think that would really help give elected leaders more confidence that there would be support for this. And so I can certainly carry that message. And it'd be great to reach out to people who participated today to support that if and when that time comes to deliver that message. We would be happy to keep this group updated via you, Christina, on how those programs are evolving and changing. In addition, I think we'd love to play a role of whatever feedback you get from your members and partners. For example, I know Jason Williams was on this call today at some point, I don't know if he still is, and I know he has a fundamental understanding of sort of why and how there might be internet challenges specific to East Missoula. And they've done a lot of work to stand up hotspots and maybe they'd be interested in partnering with the school district to find ways that they might be able to do something in that area. I don't know that but we'd be happy to do whatever we can to look at some of the specific problems and try to match up to the interests and capacity of various tech groups to figure out how to support those.
Christina: Thank you, Grant. I'll ask Danny to share a slide that has the contact information for our speakers today. So that'll go up on your screens if you want to grab that. And we will also share this information via email to everybody who registered today. And let's see, oh, the chat. Okay. And then Amelia also shared the grant application page for the Department of Commerce COVID relief. So this is just hopefully the start of a series of ongoing conversations. So if you have a great program or idea, even if it comes to you after the call has ended, please reach out and share it with us. We would love to continue this effort of supporting tech companies and giving back to our community at this time. So thank you, everyone. And thank you to our speakers today for sharing your time and expertise. Thank you to everyone who is doing so much to give back to our community at this time. We really appreciate your efforts. Everyone have a great day.