This October, which is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Team4Tech engaged 21 employee volunteers from 1Password to collaborate with our Brazil-based NGO partner, Pró-Saber SP, to improve Pró-Saber SP’s security and mitigate cybersecurity risks.
Strengthening Education Through Reading and Play
There are significant disparities in access to quality education in Brazil, with children in under-resourced communities facing substantial educational disadvantages. This inequality hinders the full development of these children and youth, limiting their future prospects.
Pró-Saber SP is an NGO based in São Paulo whose mission is to strengthen Brazilian children’s integral education through experiences in reading and playing, transforming families and communities. Pró-Saber SP operates four primary programs to ensure that children are forming foundational literacy skills. The organization also maintains a community library that has 8,000 registered users and delivers online training to educators.
Employee Volunteers Leverage Their Cybersecurity Expertise to Support the NGO
Recently, Pró-Saber SP experienced a cyber threat to their organization’s personal information. Given Pró-Saber SP’s data concerns, Team4Tech engaged employee volunteers from our corporate partner 1Password to support Pró-Saber SP by generating proposed solutions for mitigating cybersecurity risks.
In Team4Tech’s first project with Pró-Saber SP, 21 employee volunteers from 1Password collaborated with NGO staff in a Design for Impact Workshop. Team4Tech guided employee volunteers through dynamic, fast-paced sessions where participants leveraged the design-thinking process to solve a specific design challenge question posed by the NGO.
During this 3-hour virtual event, employees utilized the design-thinking process to ideate and prototype potential solutions to the following design challenge question: “As a non-technical organization, how might we better protect our digital assets from being compromised?”
It gave me firsthand insight into the challenges that an NGO faces with the tech landscape and a different perspective on how we in the tech industry can offer help.”
—1Password Volunteer
I loved that the focus was specifically around a security problem and what our company does best. Was great to have an opportunity to utilize our direct and cross-functional skills in a way we don’t often have the chance to do while also hopefully helping an organization doing great things with a real problem they have.”
—1Password Volunteer
Participants had the opportunity to learn more about the nonprofit organization’s work and ask questions to dig deeper into the design question. Then the employee volunteers spent dedicated time working in small teams to brainstorm ideas and rapidly prototype solutions. The workshop is intentionally designed to move quickly in order to foster creativity and innovation, and expert facilitation from a Team4Tech Program Director kept employee volunteers engaged and on-task.
By the end of the workshop, participants delivered recommendations to Pró-Saber SP. Volunteers presented solutions that included:
- implementing a data breach checklist
- utilizing a password manager tool
- onboarding a dedicated IT specialist
- empowering students and staff with tech and cybersecurity literacy
Each team of employee volunteers honed their decision-making, leadership, and communication skills by co-creating a short presentation to deliver to the NGO staff and whole group at the end of the workshop.
Thank you to Team4Tech for organizing and facilitating the workshop with 1Password. We heard so many great ideas and are quite excited to take these forward. The discussion in the workshop is very useful to guide us in the process of centralizing and securing our data. It has also pushed us to implement a security process for managing passwords and highlighted the importance of having a dedicated IT person on the team. The meeting was full of fresh ideas, and the 1Password team was very engaged and attentive to our needs. Thank you again for the wonderful opportunity.”
—Pró-Saber SP Team
Team4Tech is proud to facilitate connections between volunteers and education-focused NGOs like Pró-Saber SP, improving education that ultimately prepares learners for better jobs. This is just one example of Team4Tech’s global contributions to education. Our organization continues to accelerate the impact of nonprofit organizations globally.