Cisco Generous Technology Grant

John Ritchie, Senior Director Finance, Global Supply Chain at Cisco Systems and former Board Director at FTSV sponsored our Cisco Grant for a technology donation of two 55” Webex® Boards and Webex®Services. The Cisco Webex® Boards will provide everything FTSV’s need to offer high level remote training.  We will make full use of wireless presentations, whiteboarding, video and audio calls.  It will allow us to create a great teaching and learning environment across locations where technology doesn’t get in the way. We will gather the team together in our main office space and main golf location space and bring in remote participants for extended collaboration. We will pair the device with our other mobile devices to enable a range of features which will improve the meeting experience and provide richer collaboration.  The Cisco Webex® Boards will allow us to connect safely, share at a higher level and engage coaches and participants for enhanced mentorship. The heart of FTSV’s youth development program is coaching. Our coaches include paid employees and volunteers predominantly during 1.5-hour classes once a week over 8 weeks. Also, FTSV’s developmentally-appropriate character building curriculum with 5 levels requires increasingly advanced training, certification, and experience of paid employees. For example, Level I coaches may only teach the first 2 program levels. As a result, Level III coaches are fewer in number. Webex® Boards will enable us to provide Level III coaching to more of our youth by allowing those coaches to be tele-present. In addition, the Webex® Boards will provide us an opportunity to have business professionals and others speak to a class without having to be present in-person. This will greatly enhance the quality of the curriculum content that we may provide. For example, Cisco engineers would be able to speak to our STEM classes, which use the golf course as a learning lab, about physics and careers that apply class concepts. Cisco and the Cisco Foundation discover the best ideas to solve social problems, and they help make them a reality by providing funding, technology donations, and expertise. Working through nonprofit partners, they help create technology-based solutions for economic empowerment, education, critical human needs, and disaster relief, improving lives around the globe. Cisco is committed to inclusive access to digital skills training and supporting those who use technology to educate. FTSV is very grateful to Cisco for this amazing technology donation which will provide us all-in-one collaboration to super-serve our participants taking our youth development education to the next level.