As originally published on Puppet.com
One of our core values at Puppet is “Community powered. Empowering community.” With our open source roots, we’ve always had strong ties to our community of users who help us innovate much more rapidly than we could on our own. But our responsibility extends beyond our own technical community to the communities in which we live and work. As leaders in our space, we can make an even bigger difference through our philanthropy initiatives which foster diversity and inclusivity, encourage employee volunteerism, and provide greater access to technology.
Just a few months ago, we launched the Innovation Lab at Puppet in partnership with PIE (Portland Incubator Experiment) to help empower entrepreneurs and foster community within Portland’s startup community. The Innovation Lab at Puppet provides a co-working space at no charge for entrepreneurs at Puppet’s headquarters. In launching the program, we prioritized companies founded by people from systemically underrepresented populations in entrepreneurship, including women and members of the LGBTQ+, black and Latinx communities. Not only do these amazing entrepreneurs gain access to our space, they also have access to Puppet employees who have expertise across multiple disciplines, including marketing, product management, sales, engineering and more. Today we have 32 start-ups engaged with us, 40 Puppet mentors, and we are the beta customer for a couple of the startups as well. We are very fortunate to be able to share our space and knowledge with the next wave of innovators and to learn from them in the process.
Diversity and inclusion is another deeply important issue for us. Puppet has taken the TechTown Diversity Pledge and helped establish Ally Shift Workshops which teach people how to use their privilege and influence to support people who are targets of systemic oppression in their workplaces and communities. This includes women of all races, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ folks, parents, caregivers of all sorts, and people of different ages. We've cross-trained more than a dozen facilitators and held numerous workshops around the world.
To encourage employee volunteerism, we offer employees four paid volunteer days each year. We encourage employees to use these days for causes about which they are passionate, and we provide support to teams to organize group volunteer days. Many Puppet employees are highly involved in local organizations after hours and on weekends, such as providing support for Girls Who Code, hosting hackathons for underprivileged groups, and hosting events for other community organizations.
While we’ve made a lot of impact in our communities, there’s still more that we can do. That’s why we’ve joined Pledge 1%, a global movement dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes contribute to philanthropic causes. Pledge 1% provides businesses a scalable way to make a difference by empowering them to donate 1% of their staff time, product, profit, and/or equity to any charity of their choosing. We are really excited to join the Pledge, to commit 1% of our equity as part of the pledge, and further increase the impact our company and employees can have around in our communities around the world. Stay tuned to learn more on how we leverage our participation in Pledge 1% to further drive positive change in the world. And if you know other companies who might want to join us in the Pledge 1% movement, they can learn more here.
We’re proud to be making a difference in the world, not just with the technologies we build and contribute to, but through our philanthropic efforts which enable us to have an impact on both a local and global scale.
Originally posted: March 10, 2020
