Every year, we help a number of organizations championing the cause of education navigate technology challenges through the Force for Good program, a JPMorgan Chase initiative that helps under-resourced nonprofits by pairing them with the firm’s technologists. This year as well, our teams have made a difference through some impactful projects.
Working with the WinVinaya Foundation, the Force for Good Team helped to develop a hackathon based learning platform for visually impaired learners. This project was a great example of cross collaboration as the team sought expertise of the firm’s Accessibility Business Resource Group and socialized the website with them before pushing it to production.
"JPMorgan Chase's Force for Good team took up the challenge of creating a working pilot of a fully accessible Learning Management System from scratch. After multiple discussions and iterations - for scoping, reviewing demos, and providing feedback - a working pilot was delivered to the WinVinaya Foundation. The process included testing by an accessibility expert at the firm, who themself is visually impaired. We thank the entire Force for Good team for their grit, technical knowledge, patience, and empathy in delivering this project," said Shiva Jayagopal, Founder and Chairman of the WinVinaya Foundation.
i-Saksham is a non-profit organization that works in extremism affected areas, where schools can be largely dysfunctional or highly strained. In a bid to build community ownership and capabilities and thereby enable grassroots transformation, they train village youth as community leaders who then teach children.
I-Saksham approached Force for Good with the challenge that its legacy data dashboards were unable to parameterize queries. The nonprofit was also unable to schedule reports and faced issues due to mixed and blended data. The Force for Good team proposed new solutions for I-Saksham’s dashboard development and visualization. I-Saksham was soon able to source data from a wide range of data sources using one click installation of plugins and options for notifications, making life a lot simpler for I-Saksham users.
"By making a positive impact on the education of children in Bihar, India, I felt like I played a small but important role in investing in people and their future. I’m satisfied with having made a difference in the lives of others and helping to build a more equitable and just society," said Swapnil Palkar, Client Lead of the project.
Alohomora Education Foundation is a non-profit organization that empowers young people from underserved communities to be on career pathways that align with their strengths and aspirations. The organization focuses on enabling career exploration rather than counselling. CareerShala, Alohomora Education Foundation’s career exploration platform, needed a robust learning management system that could accommodate a large expected influx of students. The solution built by the Force for Good team could accommodate up to 500,000 students and was tested to be scalable and reliable. It was also cost effective and needed minimum maintenance, allowing for the smooth operation of community support forums and online learning modules for many concurrent users.
In the 2022 UN SDG Goal report, India was rated amber for quality education, indicating that challenges still exist in order to attain the goal by 2030. Technology can be a great enabler in attaining the four subgoals of quality education, which include participation rate in pre-primary organized learning, net primary school enrollment rate, lower secondary school completion and literacy rate. Social good organizations have a pivotal role to play in attaining these subgoals, and the Force for Good program continues to be an enabler in this journey.