Welcome, listeners, to the Cloud & Culture Podcast. I'm Danielle Burrow from VMware. And I'm Derek Harris from VMware. If this is your first time listening, here's a quick background. This podcast focuses on VMware Pivotal Labs experts and clients who share their experiences, tips, best practices, and opinions on app modernization and digital transformation. For a more thorough introduction, listen to a previous episode. This week, we're joined by Kristen Morse and Valerie Ellery of A21, a nonprofit dedicated to ending human trafficking around the world. They share their experience working with the nonprofit arm of VMware Pivotal Labs called Pivotal Act to digitize the organization's educational curriculum in a sustainable and secure way. It's a good discussion about an important topic, and it should give you a good sense of how Pivotal Labs' best practices can work even with organizations that have very limited IT staff and with non-technical teams trying to solve non-technical problems. But enough from us, hear Valerie and Kristen discuss their experiences now. So, Valerie, Kristen, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to have you here. Could you take a moment to just briefly introduce yourself and your role at A21? Let's start with you, Valerie. Hi. Yes, and thank you for having us. I get the pleasure to serve all of the different countries that A21 services as far as our coordinators. I am considered the Global Education Curriculum Specialist for A21 overseeing the education projects. Great. And Kristen? And my name is Kristen, and I have been with A21 for just over 11 years. I'm the Global Reach Director, so focus on prevention, awareness, and education globally and get to work with every one of our offices to implement programs and just come up with the most effective strategies to help stop trafficking before it starts. Great. Thanks. And Kristen, could you give us just a quick overview of A21's mission and, you know, how you got involved with Pivotal Act?
2:00A21 stands for Abolishing Slavery Everywhere Forever. And we operate in over 15 countries. We have a model of reach, rescue, and restore. So we are able to focus on preventing human trafficking, on operating hotlines, collecting data, the intervention piece, and then supporting survivors with long-term aftercare. And so we were able to engage with Pivotal Acts originally through a grant that we received from Dell and have been so excited about this process because it's new for us and something that we have never been able to do before but have learned so much from. And even since the engagement, we're seeing how the processes and things that we learned is really impacting our operations and really helping to support initiatives that are impacting the globe. All right. And then what was the impetus or what was A21 trying to accomplish by, you know, by getting, by engaging with Pivotal Act? Like what is the, you know, what was one of the big, big goals you all were hoping to achieve? Well, I can speak on this one for a moment. I believe that we wanted to join forces with Pivotal Act to be able to validate what we have been using in some of the resources and the way we've gone about trying to get resources into the schools, but then really define the most effective pathway forward because we, you know, along this journey over the last seven years, we have had some roads that we've hit some dead ends. And so we wanted to say, could we work alongside of a company such as Pivotal Acts and, and begin to look at evidence-based and is our curriculum, you know, what we're creating evidence-based? Could we use some of the interviews that they did with the teachers to be able to start going down that path to resource our schools so that we can have ways that, sustainable ways that continue to help us to flow into these classrooms, you know, gaining understanding of the
4:04tech landscape. I love the opportunity that, you know, we can bring this online model to the schools and that was something we've never really been able to tap into. So for me and for our education department of 821, I felt like it was just really trying to enhance what we're doing, but then validate and create pathways forward. And you mentioned, you know, kind of some obstacles and, and hitting some dead ends. Is, are there specifics there that you can speak to that, you know, you, when you were working with Pivotal Acts, you were really hoping to find solutions to address? Well, I think I, you know, I think looking at the stakeholders, I remember us doing a strategy that really involved trying to figure out, basically, I think it was called actor mapping and doing some of the personas and going in there and really saying, okay, who's our audience? How are we being impacted by, you know, the direct impact for classroom teachers versus getting to indirect with the communities and the parents, possibly the stakeholders with Department of Ed and even Ministry of Education globally. So that was a real big eye opener to really go in. And we, we've known, we need to know who our audience is and, but yet to get in there and start really looking at, you know, who's, who are they and what type of questions can we start to form to really speak to our audience? That was one big one for me with actor mapping and, and looking at the, the personas. I would also just add the timing of this engagement was so unique with COVID and it being 2020 and so much of school going online. And so having the opportunity to engage with educators to do the interviews, to really learn what does technology look like in the classroom right now? And where is it going? Helped us a lot to be able to anticipate for the future. What do we need to build? What
6:10will actually serve teachers well? And how do we need to set things up to be accessible so that they can use it in their classrooms? Yeah, absolutely. All right. Yeah. That's, that's something that comes up repeatedly whenever we talk about remote work, I think, or anything remote is, is like, oh, some of the stuff is going to stick around for the longterm. So it's, it's, it's almost as horrible as a pandemic is. It's a learning experience in a lot of ways to really like make people think about technology and doing things in a, a technology enabled way with the tools that they're going to just going to become more and more ubiquitous. So that's, that's interesting that it's, it seems to span every discussion now. It's like, this is, this is a new way of thinking about the world around us and what we're doing. I mean, I'm curious too, what was like, what does software development or IT look like within an organization like, like A21? Because I know sometimes, you know, pivotal labs and, and the VMware and who, you know, whomever the various organizations go into large enterprises, right. With huge IT teams. But I think the, the nonprofit world seems like a, a bit of a different ball game. So, so maybe you can explain what, you know, what this process might've looked like or how you would have tackled the stuff historically or on your own. As an organization, we don't really have any software development in-house. Um, our overall IT management is really lean. So we utilize software as a service to manage everything. And this has really allowed like us to manage systems and services for 150 plus staff and over a hundred volunteers at any given time. And we actually only have one IT staff member. And so working with Pivotal X was quite the experience too, of what does it look like to have a team of experts in these areas, speaking into things and just providing so much context for what we need moving forward. That's really interesting. So I imagine, you know, sustain, sustainability in terms of, you know,
8:12figuring out what the solution is really going to look like and how you can continue to manage that moving forward was, I imagine a big focus of your engagement. Definitely. So what, yeah, what, what does it look like? I mean, maybe I'm jumping ahead too, too quickly, but I'm just curious, like, did it, did working with Pivotal Act help you, did they help you find kind of resources to like build something or are you using SaaS based like third party solutions or how, how did you kind of piece something together that's, that's, that's sustainable? From that start of the engagement, we focused on like the three options of, do you need to build something? Do you need to use something that's existing or do we need to pause and wait? And so that was really helpful because every step we were looking at those different options and they really help to identify what exists and options that will work for us where we're at. And then also future options where if we do build or have more team or invest more or any situation, like what those different stats would look like in the future and what we could bring in at those points in time. And so I think for a nonprofit, we do really try to maximize our resources and we know that every dollar matters and that there's that difference between investing in IT or a survivor of human trafficking, receiving aftercare and that it supports each other and it's all really important, but there is that just weight to the funding and the importance of stewarding our resources well. And so I think working with Pivotal Acts and the fact that they recognized that and they worked with us with that in mind and continuously came back to it was really, really helpful. And it also just helps us and the leadership
10:13of our organization, like trust the recommendations because it's clear that those things have been thought through every step of the way as well. What were some of the areas where, you know, speaking of thinking through problems and thinking through things and solutions from various angles, what were some of the areas where maybe you had thought about things or, you know, I'm just, I'm curious where, you know, I'm guessing there were some successes and there was, and then there were some other things where you thought, okay, this is probably not a good idea or this is not sustainable for whatever reason. I'm curious what some of the things, where were some of the areas where you were, you recall specifically having to like, like thinking through a product problem or thinking through a solution and deciding this is not actually the one to work and we have to go in another direction. Because I think some of those, I don't call them failures, but I think those examples often are illuminate for folks like that not everything is perfect. Your first idea is not the best one, right? Or whatever. Yeah. I'm sitting here thinking, we did hit a couple of them. Just even thinking, you know, our original thought was we were going to create a complete maybe IT system that housed this, that hosted this, that had it all in there from fillables to just interaction with videos and just a lot. And it was in the process of working with the Pivotal Act team that we realized, you know, that might not be feasible. One, that might not be exactly what our users want. Because when they started doing the interview, we found out, especially in the K-5 category of students that they really need in person as well as online. So that started to become a pivotal moment for us to say, oh, you know, we need to, to backtrack a little and look at maybe this hybrid model and continue to focus on making sure that with the content of human trafficking prevention, that it is such a sensitive topic that maybe it's
12:15best that we're not just doing everything online, that we have some in-person interaction with our students. So that was one for, for me is to kind of pivot and go back to, okay, we need a hybrid model in this. On the actual platform side as well, I thought it was really interesting because we were leaning towards in the beginning, building a custom platform or utilizing our website that is custom built. And after doing the research and looking at what already exists and what schools are using, it became clear that there's another platform that is already in schools and that fits most of the boxes that we needed it to fit to be able to deliver this product. And so because of that decision and that exploration, it will save so much money for the organization long-term and be a lot more accessible to educators who need to access the materials. So I thought that was a really great finding out of this experience as well. That's awesome. That makes a lot of sense. And so it sounds like the focus of this engagement really was truly on the curriculum, delivery system for K through 12. So right now, I know, I understand you have education offerings in person at the high school level. Is that right? Yes. In the United States, we have a curriculum currently that we actually started writing in 2012 and published it in 2014. So we know and knew, we knew that the, the content really needed to be updated. And it was at that time written for just 9th and 10th graders. 821, we also have resources that have been created globally. Our primary prevention was, was, was created more for the Thailand and the students of Thailand. And then when we have started rolling that out, we're realizing we can contextualize that. We can really utilize some of the the unsafe and safe secrets and the things that we really put out there as objectives in this primary
14:18version for, for Thailand. We started realizing this could be contextualized across all of our countries and bringing it into what we are currently doing in the States. So 821 has worked alongside and partnered up with Florida Department of Ed to, to try to really look at curriculum guides. So with, it's a title four part a grant working alongside with FSU and all, but 821's resources of the primary prevention, as well as what we had for the high school curriculum bodies are not commodities, as well as our human trafficking awareness program. What we were able to do is take all of those resources and really start creating what is called a child trafficking prevention education curriculum guide. And so what we are working on and what we started working on, it was happening at the exact moment in this whole process with pivotal acts. And we were excited because in that we realized we could have a pilot of what we're doing and, and go into the state specifically and start narrowing it down to hundreds or thousands of needed teachers to, to go through a pilot study. And the pivotal team was just instrumental in helping us. And they're still helping us think through the pre and the post and what, what kind of questions we need to ask and what are we looking for inside this pilot so that it can be credible so that it can be in an, in almost, like I said earlier, a research based manner so that it has that validity to it. So that was something we were excited about and it's definitely, you know, taking what we have in the old and our ultimate goal out of all this process along with, with this work that we're doing with them where and pivotal acts and Dell and, and a 21 is to ultimately create a version two of our original ninth and 10th grade bodies are not commodities, but create a version two that has kindergarten through 12th grade that looks at the threads of human rights and identity relationship and
16:20digital safety. And so as we've been rolling this out and talking through this with the pivotal team, you know, they've really given us insights of what to think about for metrics and understanding outcome versus out bait. It was, Agnes would be so proud of me if I could remember this, but it was basically looking in the concepts of trying to do out outputs versus outcome, I think is how she always stated it. And I, I love that because outputs helped me to truly understand how we tell our a 21 story and what we do about that with how it was produced, but doesn't ever really address the impact where the outcomes did address the impact. And so we started that with that whole session we did with pivotal acts on, um, um, that Agnes led through the outputs and outcomes and metrics, uh, really was an answer to some of the areas that we may be at our team with a 21. We're trying to understand and trying to see how can we measure this with accountability to it for it. And so coming out of that, that session was, was powerful with the understanding of metrics in that regard. I wanted to ask going back a little bit. I mean, this references, I think talking about even the the, the, the, the IT department, as well as, you know, you mentioned that, that your primary, your initial draft of, of this curriculum, it was from 2014 or whatever. Cause I think a lot of organizations of all sizes and types go through this is, is, is figuring what I'm trying. And I'm curious from a nonprofit or from your, maybe just from your, you, the personal or organizational perspective of, of a 21 is how, how do you think about that balance given just the world we live in terms of, you know, balancing, balancing, helping clients, which is probably, you know, obviously the most important goal with the fact that so much stuff is digital now with the fact that stuff needs to be updated regularly and, and stuff that seven, that seven years old starts to seem certain might start to seem dated at some point. I'm just curious how, how, how you guys go through thinking about balancing all of those things, because it's, it's complicated for everyone.
18:24And again, for a nonprofit with, I think it's probably even a little more complicated, just given how dedicated everyone is to the actual, you know, humane centered outcome of how we're trying to achieve. So. Yeah. I do think it's a challenging balance sometimes. And we always try to accomplish a lot with a very little. And I think that a 21 does a good job at that in the case of a resource like this, because it feeds directly into operations, the more up to date, the information that we're educating teachers and students on about human trafficking, the better it is in terms of being able to identify more potential victims of trafficking and actually stopping the cycle of trafficking. And so we see it not necessarily as competing, but really supporting each other. But there is that evaluation of, is this urgent? Does it need to be done now? Whereas in the case of a survivor of human trafficking who comes into our care, there's a lot of immediate needs. And so I think it's that perspective of what's the long-term goal and what are we building over time versus what do we have to take care of right now? And so I think that we have done a good job at figuring out how to really maximize the resources that we have. So in terms of Bodies Are Not Commodities published in 2014, we've been able to take that resource and work with ministries of education globally and really repurpose the material and incorporate the content so that we're reaching millions of students along the way. And then once we do the second version and have it available, there'll be a long-term scalability plan for how we continue to do that in other countries. So it's always building upon each other. And I think that as the momentum continues, that's when you continue to bring in the investment and increased IT and
20:24support and staffing capacity because there is the momentum there and there's the effectiveness and you can see that it's already working. Yeah. And I think if I can piggyback on that, I think working with Pivotal X and just recently doing the strategic tree was a wonderful technique for us because it really refocused us, came back to, you know, how do we know we've achieved the outcome and what is our outcome? It made us really go back in education. It's fewer students becoming victims of trafficking. So keeping that purpose, keeping that why, even in the midst of trying to balance all of this, if we can communicate to our audience now that we know, you know, exactly, you know, the, the direct and indirect audiences, how can we, how can we take what we've learned and how can we take the curriculum that we have and really determine the marketing piece to this? And I think that that strategic tree helped us focus on, you know, what actions are we going to take to achieve this? I remember them asking the question, and we just all started doing these brainstorming techniques inside there. And basically, you know, we came up with making sure that we create and develop relevant resources that in this case, that can be updated regularly because we know the statistics are changing, things are happening. And so that online version, that opportunity to have templates where we can get in there and digitally change it without having to have to publish a hard copy and, and deal with a hard published version of what we've had in the past, but have that online version where at any time, you know, as statistics change, as new methods or different things come up that we can help for prevention education, we're able to go back in and be able to alter this and change it up. But yeah, I, I, I love, I mean, I mean, the, the concept of trying to balance it all with everything else going on, if we could just keep, and I think if we're understanding your question right there, if we can just keep at the
22:24level of, this is the why this is necessary, how are we aligning it to the health standards? And, and like Kristen mentioned, in South Africa, we had to switch and, you know, we couldn't quite get into their standards at that level. So we started understanding where are their standards? Where are we to contextualize? And they were doing it through life orientation classes. So we took our, our basic understanding of what we have for prevention education, and then aligned it to meet their needs and their language of how they present it in the classroom. So it's just an ever changing, who's the audience? And here's our product, our product pretty much stays the same, but then we contextualize along this journey. It sounds like you're able to really take advantage of the soft and software, like to make those, you know, those little adjustments and tweaks in a way that maybe, you know, like you said, would be a lot more time consuming or difficult to distribute as a hard copy. So. Absolutely. And, you know, the, the thing about, I, I, for me, I can personally say as an education specialist for a 21 and somebody that's been sitting in the seat of education as a curriculum specialist for 30 something years is we, we didn't have to look at digital and online versions the way we have to today. So our mind shifts have to change. We know that that is reaching our students. We know that that's one avenue of venue that, you know, the space for a 21, we haven't sat in and worked that course of action. And so this, this whole opportunity with pivotal acts and, and taking us to the next level will truly help us reach beyond what we ever asked or imagine of understanding for our students and our educators. That's great. I had one question, you know, when we were talking to Ellie, who is the director of pivotal act and she had mentioned, you know, working with a 21 and, and we were kind of in a discussion
24:25with her about software development and designing a product and thinking through, you know, the kind of unintended consequences that can occur and how important it is to really think through those very, very carefully when you're designing a product for a program such as yours, because you know, you're dealing with such a sensitive and a sensitive topic and, you know, people's lives are at stake. So I wondered if, if there were any moments in your design process, thinking through this product when, you know, you thought you'd kind of go down one road and then realized, oh, we probably shouldn't go that direction because it could lead to X, Y, and Z. Is there anything like that? Yeah. I think it was, if I can remember as we were processing that, that mitigation, the risks and mitigation and unintended consequences. And one of them really struck home for me was thinking about students socially and economically disadvantaged as we go down this path and knowing that we're going to have to find alternative ways. So for that, it was, you know, we assumed maybe X was our user, but maybe it's really why that was our user. And so thinking about how to go into the hybrid manner, thinking about the sensitivity within it, how, how do you, you know, make sure there's protocols set up for, you know, disclosure as, as, as such a sensitive topic, you know, so we were backtracking on a few ways of pushing forward and then kind of, you know, hitting roadblock of, you know, we need to make sure that if we're going to put this kind of content out there, that we make sure there's reporting and protocols and disclosure information, making sure that, you know, I think one of the, is probably a risk factor was also if the lack of effective distribution, you know, if we're going to create this product, we need to have a plan in place now for how to distribute this and distribute it into the schools and what's the best ways. So that's something else we're
26:30looking for future opportunities to be able to do. Yeah. On that, I also thought it was interesting just following what Valerie was saying. There was a point where we were talking about how you remove the barriers for accessibility for educators to be able to get this material. And we also talked about if students would have direct access to it. And just through the conversations, realizing how easy it is for the wrong person to access material, whether they're too young and the materials too old, or they don't have the proper support system that they need, if they need to make a report, or if they're in a dangerous situation, viewing the material in their own home with at home schooling that's happening right now. So I think those were all really interesting conversations that you wouldn't necessarily think of when you're starting, because your motivation is good. Like, let's get this important information out to everyone, but realizing that there has to be safety and protocols and structure to that. And just making sure that we do our due diligence up front to avoid any unintended consequences that we can. Yes. Those school networks are not entirely. I think my daughter had an issue recently where someone's accounts got, some kids got hacked through, I think a video gaming service or something, but then all of a sudden he's in there, someone's in her Google meet posting profanity. And it's like, yeah, you realize some of these schools, these systems are great for certain stuff, but the more sensitive you get, the more you probably want to, the, you know, browsing histories are stored forever, basically at the administrators. Yes. And even some of our videos, you know, our videos, there's some that if they're watching online and online version, knowing that they may have a younger brother, sibling, a sister that could be viewing something that was not intended for them. So, you know, making sure that we have, you know, as before they start to watch this video, we have disclosures pop up and help them understand that
28:31we're getting not disclosure, but situations pop up to let them know that we have content that might be not viewed by all. So to check your surroundings, you know, things like that, we started to have conversations about, especially if it goes to the online version way of how do you keep from having younger eyes, not see what some of the upper grades might see. And I wanted to ask too, because you both had mentioned previously, some of the, the difficulties might not be the word, but the complexities, I guess, of working across different geographies and different countries. And I'm guessing, you know, there are laws around data, there are data regulations. There's all sorts, especially with sensitive data, there's all sorts of different systems in place in different parts of the world. How do you balance working with that? Just generally, I mean, in terms of there's the cultural aspect, and then there's the regulatory aspect. I'm just curious how you guys think about balancing that as, as you engage or try to do something in a different geography. Our organization is global. So we do work in countries and collect data in different countries. So usually what we do is look at GDPR and kind of the most strict area that we're in and then apply that rule across the board. So we definitely work on that with compliance and making sure that everything is in order. But it is a challenge to like constantly be keeping up with the differences in the different locations and to just make sure that we're doing everything in the way that we need to for security. And we do have coordinators in each one of the countries, reach coordinators that really start to look at in the education field, what are, who are the key players and what it, what protocol is in place for schools and how do they get their resources into schools and especially looking at where it fits best as far as the, like I said, life orientation, the content delivery of it. And then, you know,
30:36we have had to go into countries and set up a memorandum of understanding, basically just setting up opportunities that we make sure that we have it covered on our end of the content delivery and how this goes about and making sure that it speaks the language of each country and the rules and regulations for them. All right, cool. Yeah. I always think back to, we had a customer, a case study a while ago, that was a GM and they were talking about how all of a sudden the Chinese data regulation changed. And within a year, basically everything had to be hosted in mainland China. And this was for an infotainment system. So it was, it was like, okay, one day we're, this is the operating procedure. The next day we have to figure out how to trends or how to, you know, basically migrate all of this stuff to China and in a very condensed timeframe. It's like, you're right. These, like you said, just take, sometimes just taking the strictest regulation and assuming that'll do, it might be the the safest way to keep yourself out of, you know, out of harm's way or out of issues going forward. I guess one thing that I, I was curious about, Valerie, you mentioned earlier, you know, doing this exercise to identify outcomes versus output. And I wondered like, what are those outcomes that you all are working towards? Like, what are those, those top goals? And I'm wondering how you're measuring them just given that you are global and what we've been talking about, you know, just in terms of data, like, like, are you, yeah. How, how do you, how do you know if human trafficking is being reduced or how do you, like, how do you figure that out? Well, I think, and Kristen might speak better on this because we do have reports all the time that we're currently trying to keep records of. But I think for us is identifying, you know, ultimately being able to identify the number of cases, maybe confirmed in an area that once we've established and our
32:36resources are in that area, then maybe keep track of what were the numbers before. And then as we go through these programs with communities and with schools, you know, the number of cases confirmed, maybe the number of hotlines called. However, we know that when they've been informed and they've gone through prevention, that the numbers might rise, you know, right at the beginning, because, you know, they're all aware now. So trying to look at those, you know, in the schools, number of engaged, maybe it's, we call A-teens, but number of engaged programs that are now established. That was one of the things that we talked about when we looked at some solutions and some outcomes that might could, could occur through the work that we've done with Pivotal. A number of trained educators, number of implementation of, of what we have with number of students, you know, impacted, those kinds of things. But Kristen, I don't know, maybe you might be able to help. Yeah, I would, I would just add to that. It's been really great working with different universities studies and doing longitudinal studies and just starting to really evaluate from a research-based perspective, our programs and the impact that they're having. And then we also are able to collect different testimonies and stories as we go. And so just knowing that one student who went through our education program was able to recognize when someone tried to recruit her on an online social media platform after, um, she made a report and then there was a police investigation opened up to look into it. So I think those stories that come out over time are really what motivates us as well, because we know that it matters. Like the one person, the one student who's educated, the one person who isn't trafficked, that's what it's about. And so we do our due diligence in measuring the numbers and getting all of the quantitative data in. But I think the qualitative testimonies and stories that come out of it are really what motivates us to keep going as well. Yeah, absolutely. It was, it was definitely in that
34:42time of working with that metrics. I remember thinking, okay, can't just look in one area. We need to look at awareness, engagement, the resources. So that was a pivotal moment too, is to making sure that we're expanding our ability to what are the outcomes in all of these areas. And, and I know that we started, you know, taking notes and changing some of the ways that we're trying to, in the future, as we start these pilot programs, collect this data and then measure it along this, along this journey. That's great. All right. Seems like a good place to end it. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us today. Really been great to speak with you both. Thank you. For sure. Yeah. Thank you guys.