Announcing our Amazing 2014 Force for Change Innovation Grant Recipients!

The Salesforce.org is on a mission to leverage salesforce.com’s products, equity and time to improve communities around the world. We call this integrated philanthropic approach the 1-1-1 model because we’ve committed 1% of salesforce.com’s world-class technology, 1% of our founding equity and 1% of our employees’ time to help maximize the impact of higher education and nonprofit organizations that are changing the world.

In support of this vision, each year we award Force for Change innovation grants to registered charities and higher education organizations from around the world that are focused on creating Salesforce applications that will introduce innovative technologies to accelerate success and positively impact these sectors. This year’s Force for Change innovation grant recipients represent some of the world’s most inspirational change agents. And we’re extremely excited to announce them today!

Below are our 2014 Saleforce.com Foundation Force for Change innovation grant recipients:

• Airlink enables humanitarian aid worldwide by connecting nonprofits with airlines willing to donate or discount air transportation. Airlink’s grant enables development of a real-time disaster response application, built on Salesforce1, to more quickly and effectively match sudden and urgent humanitarian need with donated or discounted airline supply.
• Cornell University, along with The Higher Education Advisory Council, will use their grant to collaboratively build a higher ed-specific accelerator for Salesforce Communities. The solution will be easy for any school to implement, and will help ensure millions of our future leaders can concentrate on their studies instead of administrative bureaucracy.
• Health Leads mobilizes advocates to work with low-income patients to connect them with the existing resource provider landscape within their communities. Their grant will be used to significantly scale Health Lead’s program by packaging its enabling Salesforce application, ClientConnect, so it can be shared with hospitals, clinics and other organizations.
• Homeless Link (UK) is the national membership organization for homelessness services in England. Their charity members run homelessness services such as hostels, supported housing, day centers, outreach and employment projects for homeless people. Homeless Link will use their grant to develop a tiered offering of their successful In-Form client reporting application to enable charities in all categories of their membership to better respond to their needs of their clients.
• Johns Hopkins University is one of the preeminent research institutions, with a mission of creating knowledge for the world. JHU will utilize its grant to build a Salesforce Communities-based, robust and extensible application to connect brilliant researchers and their ideas together so they can collaboratively solve some of the most complicated global problems.
• myAgro (Mali, West Africa) is on a mission to help small-scale farmers get out of poverty, permanently. The objective of their grant is to further develop their platform to support myAgro’s expansion with a vision of signing on partners to replicate and scale the myAgro model through their own rural networks to reach one million farmers in 10 years.
• Skoll Foundation drives large-scale change by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs and the innovators who help them solve the world’s most pressing problems. The Skoll Foundation, with the support of Salesforce.org, will develop a reporting and outcomes application that enables systematic analysis of portfolio grantees, creating a powerful new channel to measure and communicate their effectiveness.
• The Nature Conservancy is the leading international nonprofit conservation organization whose mission is to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends. Their grant will be used to advance environmental monitoring through hands-free technology. Using Salesforce and Google Glass, the Conservancy will develop the Developer Wearable Starter application to transform how its field scientists monitor and measure bird migrations.

Congratulations to each of these 2014 grantees! We’re so very inspired and humbled by all you do.

If you’d like to learn more about Force for Change, including about previous grantees, please visit our website.