Twilio.org Funds Four New Organizations

Twilio.org Funds Four New Organizations

Whether it’s a text message between an inmate and his daughter, a call that reminds a refugee of their citizenship appointment or a conversation between a counselor and a struggling teenager, the right communication at the right time can change lives.

The Twilio.org Impact Fund supports organizations who are leveraging innovative communications to deliver impact at scale. We are excited today to announce three nonprofits and one social enterprise as the latest Fund recipients. Edovo is our second investment in a social enterprise, Hustle being our first. Likewise, this is our second round of grants, which are supporting the International Rescue Committee (IRC), MindRight, and Caravan Studios. Each of these are organizations is working to create impact at scale in their respective fields, and we could not be more excited to welcome them to the Twilio.org family.

In 2017, Twilio.org awarded more than $1.5 million in impact funds and plans to award an additional $1.5 million in 2018. The next funding round for nonprofits will open in May 2018. Investments are evaluated on an ongoing basis.

In addition to grants, the Twilio.org Impact Fund invests makes investments in social enterprises who are using innovative communications strategies to carry out their missions and have demonstrated the potential to scale further through technology. Twilio invested in Edovo to support their efforts to decrease recidivism rates through correctional education and their vision to change the way inmates communicate with their loved ones.

Edovo’s mission is to help everyone connected to incarceration build better lives by providing meaningful access to education, communication, and self-improvement tools. Although education and communication with loved ones are well-documented ways to keep people out of jail and prison, most prisoners don’t have regular access to these programs while incarcerated. Edovo provides tablet-based education and re-entry support as well as messaging-based communication for inmates. With this investment from Twilio, Edovo plans to provide lower cost communication options and free education to even more of the incarcerated population, helping to improve the correctional communications industry.

In addition to the investment in Edovo, Twilio.org also awarded grants to three nonprofits. Recipients include:

International Rescue Committee – The IRC responds to some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. With this grant, the IRC will begin developing a digital and SMS-based system to dramatically improve client-caseworker communications and provide the IRC with data to more effectively support newly resettled refugees as they adapt to their lives in the United States.

MindRight – MindRight is a tech nonprofit whose mission is to empower youth of color to heal from trauma by providing personalized, live mental health coaching to teens over text messaging. With this grant, Mindright will produce the next version of their web application that will deliver real-time reports on student’s emotional wellness to community leaders, so that they can track the performance of participants.

Caravan Studios –  Caravan Studios, a division of Techsoup, is an nonprofit that builds apps that help communities organize, access, and apply local resources to their most pressing problems. With this grant, Caravan Studios will internationalize 4Bells, a mobile app that deploys skilled volunteers to time-sensitive tasks such as delivering supplies after a disaster or providing legal services to refugees.

About Twilio.org

Twilio.org the social impact arm of Twilio. Our mission at Twilio.org is to fuel communications that give hope, power, and freedom. We connect social impact organizations, passionate software developers, and the full power of the Twilio platform to ignite positive change on a local to global scale.