For six months last year, a highly skilled team of Google employees worked full time — pro bono — to help a charity called Thorn tackle a tough technology challenge that has heartbreaking consequences.
Thorn’s work takes place in the dark corners of the internet, building technology to fight child pornography, track online predators, and help law-enforcement officers identify victims of child trafficking. Online ads for trafficking victims and exploitative material have proliferated. While the increase is alarming, the text, phone numbers, and photos in those ads offer vital clues to the identities of the young victims.
“We have a ton of data, hundreds of millions of pieces of data,” says Julie Cordua, chief executive of Thorn. “Somewhere in there are children.”
Google’s engineers worked with Thorn’s technologists to deploy artificial intelligence to identify patterns in the data that law-enforcement officers can use to identify perpetrators and find victims faster.
50,000 Pro Bono Hours
After the successful test run at Thorn, the search-engine giant is making the effort official. The company has started the Google.org Fellowship program to send employees to work full time for up to six months to help nonprofits harness technology to help solve critical social problems. The goal is to provide 50,000 pro bono hours in 2019, which the company thinks will translate into five to 10 fellowship projects. At this point, Google is working only with its existing grantees, so other charities cannot apply for assistance from the fellows.
Next up, a team of seven software engineers and data scientists starts work this week with Goodwill to develop a data strategy to measure its impact and make more informed decisions. The deployment will last three months.
The fellowship program grew out of feedback from the nonprofits Google supports, says Lacy Caruthers, Google.org’s director for employee engagement,
“Nonprofits want to do more with technology, but it can be really hard for them to find and retain the technical talent, software engineers, product managers, and others whose skill sets they need to deliver on that work,” she says. “Google obviously has that talent in-house.”
The company’s No. 1 goal is to help grantees accelerate their impact on social challenges, she says. But it also hopes the fellowship experience will help employees develop professionally and build better and more inclusive products when they return to Google.
Sharing Lessons
The project at Thorn was an eye-opening experience for both the Google fellows and the nonprofit’s tech folks.
Google employee Samantha Ainsley had been questioning whether she still wanted to be a software engineer when she found out about the opportunity to work at Thorn.
“I had struggled for a few years — and I don’t think I’m alone in this as an engineer — really trying to understand if I could have any social impact in the work I was doing,” she says.
Ainsley says working with the nonprofit showed her that her technology expertise really could make a difference. But before she could learn that lesson, Ainsley says she and her Google colleagues had to get beyond their preconceived notions of what working with a nonprofit would entail.
They expected that they would have to adjust to a very different coding environment and maybe even build technology infrastructure for the organization before they could start the project. Instead, the Google employees were deeply impressed by the efficiency and elegance of the nonprofit technologists’ coding, which Ainsley says was the result of having to make every dollar count.
“I’ve learned a lot about being a better designer,” she says.
‘How Will This Scale?’
The Google employees, in turn, brought their experience working on projects that deal with massive amounts of data, says Cordua, Thorn’s chief executive. She says the fellows often said things like, “OK, this may work now, but how will this scale into the future when we get to bigger and bigger amounts of data?”
Cordua thinks that one of the reasons the project was successful is that as a technology nonprofit Thorn looks and acts a lot like a software company. More than half of the group’s employees are software engineers, data scientists, and product managers. Five years ago, she says, Thorn’s technology team was far less developed, and it tried unsuccessfully to incorporate pro bono engineering help.
“It was quite difficult because if someone built something and then they leave, who’s going to carry that forward?” she says. Cordua thinks it would be hard for a nonprofit that doesn’t have a strong technology team to benefit from the fellowship program.
The folks at Google agree. The pilot at Thorn helped the company refine how it would choose future nonprofit assignments for fellows, Caruthers says. Making sure that nonprofits have the in-house expertise to maintain a project after the fellows return to Google will be an important factor. The company will also look for projects that make use of its strengths in areas like machine learning, mapping, and big data and that have the potential to scale beyond the grantees’ own work and affect the larger field in which they work.
Emotional Check-Ins
For Samantha Ainsley, the project at Thorn did more than sharpen her technology skills and reinvigorate her excitement about engineering. It changed the way she approaches being a colleague and a leader.
Because the sexual abuse of children is such a horrific problem to confront, Thorn leaders and staff members regularly check on their emotional states to talk about how they feel about what they’ve seen and learned, Ainsley says.
“You really have to take your walls down because you’re talking about things every single day that are so devastating and so sensitive and so uncomfortable,” she says.
It’s totally different than most corporate cultures. Working in an industry where women are vastly outnumbered by men, Ainsley says that she and other women worry about being taken seriously. There’s pressure to be cold and totally focused on the technical aspects of a problem.
When Ainsley returned to Google, she brought Thorn’s humane approach to interacting with colleagues with her.
“It was really amazing for me to be able to go back and have confidence in what it can look like when you bring your whole self to work,” she says. Ainsley’s time at Thorn changed her mind about the power of empathy. “I used to see it as a weakness, and I went back to feeling like it was a strength.”
