Social impact investments

For Cisco Social Impact Investments and Innovation and the Cisco Foundation, our mission is to partner with organizations to create and scale innovative digital solutions that promote a healthy planet and advance the wellbeing and self-reliance of underserved communities globally. We accomplish this by harnessing the breadth of Cisco’s offerings of strategic guidance, catalytic funding, technology donations, and support from Cisco’s global employee community. We invest along a continuum of needs, encompassing crisis response, education, economic empowerment, and climate impact and regeneration.

Cisco’s four social investment sectors are:

Crisis response

Our crisis response strategy is to help overcome the cycle of poverty and dependence. To that end, we support organizations that address critical human needs of underserved communities—food security, stable housing, clean water, and disaster preparedness, response, and relief—because those who have their basic needs met are better equipped to survive and recover from crises and ultimately thrive.

Education

Our education strategy aims to promote quality education through initiatives that promote awareness, interest, engagement, and improved outcomes for school-age children, and professional development for teachers. We support organizations that increase equitable access to high quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, literacy programs, STEM career exploration, and initiatives that educate and engage youth in climate regeneration. We also consider programs that build teacher capacity in classrooms around the world, help overcome barriers to accessing climate change education, and invite student engagement globally to positively affect the environment.

Economic empowerment

Our strategy here is to invest in solutions that provide equitable access to the knowledge, skills, resources, and opportunities that people need to support themselves and their families toward agency, stability, independence, and economic security. Within this strategy, we focus on employment and career development, entrepreneurship, and financial inclusion. Our goal is to support organizations and solutions that not only enable individuals and families to thrive, but also participate in and contribute to local community growth and economic development in a sustainable economy.

Climate impact and regeneration

In 2021, the Cisco Foundation committed US$100 million over 10 years to support resilient ecosystems. Our funding takes two forms: impact investments and grant funding to nonprofit organizations. This flexible approach helps us more comprehensively fill critical climate financing gaps and catalyze impact. Our grant-making focuses on supporting organizations in areas of natural carbon sinks, regenerative agriculture, and community climate education and engagement. By contrast, our impact investments are directed to a combination of for-profit companies and climate impact funds to validate solutions in critical early-growth periods that allows us not only to identify their innovations but scale them as well.

Social investment approach

We provide patient and catalytic capital to high-potential organizations, helping them to:

• Ideate and experiment to design innovative technology solutions addressing individual and community needs
• Test and prove the effectiveness of those solutions
• Improve the delivery, quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of their products and services
• Scale to reach more people
• Replicate to multiple sectors and geographies globally
• Monitor progress and validate social impact
• Make progress toward financial sustainability
• Collect, analyze, and leverage timely, reliable, high-quality data for better business insights, decision-making, and programming

We apply an all-in approach, tapping into the full complement of Cisco resources and assets. Beyond cash grant investments, we donate Cisco technology to help our nonprofit partners securely deliver essential programs and offerings to the individuals and communities in which they operate. We also want to equip our partners for sustained impact beyond our life cycle of investment. To this end, we lend our staff time and expertise, providing ongoing consulting services, advisory support, and technical expertise in a variety of areas including:

• Business planning and strategy development
• Organizational management structure and leadership capacity
• Financial sustainability planning
• Impact evaluation and reporting
• Governance and operational structure

We also strive to ensure that solutions we support serve communities that need them most. We intentionally target underserved population groups, which includes low-income individuals, underrepresented minorities, and/or vulnerable populations (such as women and girls, youth, racial/ethnic minorities, and refugees or internally displaced persons).

Social investment strategy