Category: Nonprofit

Every year since 1964, the month of February has been designated as American Heart Month—and for good reason. The heart pumps approximately 2,000 gallons of blood and beats around 115,000 times every day. This Valentine’s Day, the heart is on our minds more than ever. To encourage people to take steps toward a healthy heart and prevent heart disease, the American Heart Association (AHA) is dedicated to breaking down siloes in cardiovascular research and making datasets available to more scientists than ever. Their Precision Medicine Platform, powered by AWS, does exactly that.

Federation for Internet Alerts (FIA), the nonprofit whose mission is to get crucial alerts in front of the right people at the right time and place, recently received multiple Creative Media Awards for its life-saving technology. It’s also the second consecutive year that FIA has won the Shorty Social Good Award for Technology. And this is just the start.

The health of our oceans is vital to a sustainable future on Earth. However, due to the impact of climate change and other damaging human interactions, such as overfishing and land-based pollution, our oceans are in danger of failing to perform their critical functions.

The cloud enables organizations to achieve their missions faster, speed up innovation, and save costs by scaling up quickly without the lengthy and costly process of acquiring additional hardware. Although more public sector organizations are adopting the cloud for mission-critical workloads, misconceptions about vendor lock-in still exist.

The United Nations (UN) has named 17 goals that will help boost sustainable development worldwide. Technology and cloud-based solutions will be a critical part of achieving the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs). DigitalGlobe, one of the world’s leading providers of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and analysis, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), has launched the GBDX for Sustainability Challenge. We are looking for passionate participants who can leverage machine learning and high-resolution satellite imagery for geospatial solutions that support these sustainable development goals, such as disaster response, food security, poverty elimination, and ending malaria, to name a few.

We strive to meet our customers not only where they are now, but also where they want to be in the future. This requires constant innovation and rapid development of public sector solutions each year. In 2017, this took the form of the AWS Secret Region, achieving DoD Impact Level 5, and making AWS Educate available to students ages 14 and older – just to name a few highlights.

At this year’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS made important announcements and hosted unique activities relevant to our government, education, and nonprofit customers. Below are ten takeaways from re:Invent 2017 that have particular relevance for the public sector

The new Digital Transformation Checklist whitepaper provides a list of strategies and tactics aimed at helping you navigate the digital transformation process. It is both prescriptive and elaborative, as it outlines steps for organizations to overcome blockers to innovation.

Brushed-up coding skills. A first encounter with computer science. A lesson in persistence. This year’s installment of Hour of Code was another success for Computer Science Education Week and Code.org – and for the future of women and underrepresented minorities in technology.

Combatting modern forms of exploitation demands modern tools. AWS works with several national and international organizations who are committed to protecting human rights. Many nonprofit organizations rely on AWS to help prevent and expose human rights abuses through machine learning, facial and voice recognition, and more, as well as to reduce their overall IT costs so they can focus on mission-critical work.