At Cisco, we make social investments in three areas where we believe our technology and our people can make the biggest impact—education, economic empowerment, and crisis response, the last of which incorporates shelter, water, food, and disaster relief. Together, these investment areas help people overcome barriers of poverty and inequality, and make a lasting difference by fostering strong global communities.
We seek to help overcome the cycle of poverty and dependence and achieve a more sustainable future through strategic investments. We back organizations that successfully address critical needs of underserved communities, because those who have their basic needs met are better equipped to learn and thrive.
What we look for:
Note: By policy, relief campaigns respond to significant natural disaster and humanitarian crises as opposed to those caused by human conflict. Also by policy, our investments in this area do not include healthcare solutions.
Learn more about our community partners and CSR programs that support crisis response.
Our strategy is to invest $100M in Cisco Foundation funds over the next decade to help reverse the impact of climate change, working toward a sustainable and regenerative future for all.
The commitment includes both grant and impact investment funding for early-stage climate innovation. Both categories of support will be focused on bold climate solutions, and the grants side will also focus on community education and activation. Grants will go to exceptionally aligned nonprofit organizations, while impact investments will go to highly promising for-profit solutions via the private sector and climate impact funds.
Funding comes from the Cisco Foundation and will focus on:
We will prioritize organizations that can achieve, measure, and report outcomes such as:
Whenever possible, we will seek projects that support and are informed by Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Indigenous fire science, decolonized systems theory, and Tribal ways of knowing. These traditional approaches can assist in envisioning and creating viable solutions to issues like forestry and fire risk management. Our hope is to fund hybrid solutions and curricula that combine traditional perspectives with state-of-the-art technology in a way that yields ecosystem restoration while reciprocally benefitting communities as part of our commitment to powering an inclusive future for all.
The following criteria apply only to climate impact and regeneration projects, as deviations from Cisco’s other three issue focus area grant policies and criteria:
Learn more about our commitment to environmental sustainability and regeneration.
Our strategy is to invest in early stage, tech-enabled solutions that provide equitable access to the knowledge, skills, and resources that people need to support themselves and their families toward resilience, independence, and economic security.
Our goal is to support solutions that benefit individuals and families, and that contribute to local community growth and economic development in a sustainable economy.
We target our support in three interconnected areas:
Learn more about our community partners and CSR programs that support economic empowerment.
Our strategy is to inclusively invest in technology-based solutions that increase equitable access to education while improving student performance, engagement, and career exploration. We support K-12 solutions that emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) as well as literacy. We also consider programs that teach environmental sustainability, eliminate barriers to accessing climate change education, and invite student engagement globally to positively affect the environment.
What we look for:
Note that Cisco does not provide direct funding to nonprofits or schools for the following:
Learn more about our community partners and CSR programs in education.
Funding to multiply the tech-fueled impact of organizations with national or multinational operations.
Funding for programs that serve the underserved in India by leveraging technology.
Funding to support Bay Area programs within a 50-mile radius of Cisco’s San Jose, California headquarters.
We donate Cisco’s best-in-class networking technology to help nonprofits make innovative use of the Internet.