‍Paragon One is a team out of MIT (and Y-Combinator) that facilitates remote Externships to empower your employees to launch strategic projects with diverse students at scale without burdening teams and budget.

We’re profiling industry leaders to gather their insights into the transforming worlds of DEI, social impact, and brand elevation. 

Sid Espinosa’s career has spanned the philanthropic, government and business sectors. He is currently the Head of Social Impact at GitHub. Previously, Mr. Espinosa has served as the mayor of Palo Alto, CA, and as the director of philanthropy at Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for a combined 20+ years. He has worked for a U.S. ambassador overseas, served as an aide to former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno at the U.S. Department of Justice, and worked in the speechwriting and public liaison offices in the White House. Mr. Espinosa has served on numerous non-profit, business and foundation boards of directors, as well as boards at his alma maters, Wesleyan and Harvard.

What piqued your interest in starting a career in social impact?

I grew up in a household that valued public service and community engagement: “Be a force for good in the world and leave this place better than you found it,” with constant role modeling by my parents. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that most of my career has been a quest to find roles where I can tackle tough societal problems, explore innovative solutions, and hopefully utilize any unique talents and skills to add real value. That journey has taken me across sectors – from policy and government to business and tech to philanthropy and nonprofits. Fast forward a few years, and it’s exciting to see that some of the most compelling social impact work that we see today is reaching across these very sectors, recognizing that systemic change often comes from cross-sector leadership. It’s an exciting time in the social impact space.

For those thinking of a career in social impact, I’d offer both a hearty welcome with a few words of caution. This work is inspiring, values-driven, intellectually challenging, and often uplifting. You work on issues that really matter to individuals and communities. But, this work can also be frustrating, emotionally exhausting, demoralizing, and upsetting. You can work on a community issue, say homelessness, for your whole career, and the situation could be worse by the time that you retire. These issues are complex and hard. The work is tough. But it’s important and rewarding. Weighing everything, I’m exactly where I want to be career-wise because it’s where I think that I can have the biggest and most positive impact.

What’s the most essential DEI or CSR focus you see across the next 5 years for any brand in the Fortune 1000?

Every Fortune 1000 company should be thinking about business integration and issue intersectionality. It wasn’t long ago that no one had heard of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or more recently Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG). As these fields have grown, they are often under-resourced, marginalized, and misunderstood. Accessibility for the disabled, environmental sustainability, governance and ethics, diversity and inclusion, philanthropy and community engagement, policy and politics, employee engagement and empowerment – the list continues. The elephant in the room then became: How do we make this work integral to the business? How do we not have these stand-alones but instead integrated at the core of the business? From a company’s products and services, and facilities, to customers, supply chain, employees, and more, societal topics must be tightly bound to business.

The change in this space has been rapid. Top corporations now have annual reports in this space and have introduced departments that didn’t exist just a decade or two ago. Business school graduates are focusing on these areas. Wall Street is demanding more transparency and reporting as investors look for leadership on these topics. All the while, recruiting and retaining employees increasingly leans on corporate brands to speak to these issues. And now most leading companies are thinking about the intersectionality of the issues and areas where they focus. How does diversity relate to environmental sustainability? How does a focus on educational investments or up-skilling relate to accessibility? How are new product rollouts non-biased or unethical?

We’re in an exciting time for this work and I’m excited for the future.    

How is GitHub appealing to Gen Z professionals from a career destination standpoint?

For over a decade, Deloitte has released an annual survey of Millennials and Gen Z, and one of the notable – though not surprising – indicators has been Gen Z’s deep concern for the state of the world and their professional interest in advocating for greater action by their employers and seeking opportunities to engage via their workplace. This generation sees social impact as core to their personal lives, especially environmental sustainability and protection, and as a necessary core value for their employers. They want better leadership and significant action now, not just for the long term.

At GitHub, we know that we must live up to our values and act as a leader in social impact. As the platform is home to more than 100 million developers around the world, it is our responsibility to engage in this very action. We collaborate with multiple generations of developers and often hear from prospective employees about wanting to join us because of who we are and what we stand for within the tech community.

At GitHub we seek to accelerate human progress through developer collaboration. Frankly, we want to be authentic, innovative and collaborative. We don’t do this work for a marketing splash or a quick win. We know that community challenges are complex and tough, and we all believe that GitHub as a community and corporation has an important role and serious responsibility in civil society – so we seek to have real and meaningful impact.

Sometimes that work is research focused (so that we and others can know how best to engage), like our funding of open source software in the social sector. Sometimes we want to act swiftly and leverage our products/unique assets, like when war broke out in Ukraine, and we moved quickly to collaborate with the Norwegian Refugee Council on a project to ensure that beneficiaries received cash-based transfers in a timely manner.  And sometimes we focus on the empowerment of our employees, like supporting their philanthropic donations (matching up to $15,000 per year per employee) and volunteerism ($20 nonprofit donation for every hour volunteered). Together, it’s our mission to make a positive impact in partnership with our employees.

What are some new ways your company is looking to get team members, company-wide, involved in the greater social impact initiative of your brand?

Without question, a great strength of GitHub’s social impact work stems from its employees. Frankly, our employees haven’t waited for the company to initiate social impact work, and since its founding our employees have rolled-up their sleeves to lead the way. 

Before the company had hired a Head of Accessibility, for example, employees had already formed a group to develop a vision and approach to accessibility for products, facilities, and employees. Employees have been similarly self-organized around environmental sustainability. So while you ask what we’re doing to rally employees, the reality is that they are often leading this work and we are finding ways to support their leadership. We have a program called Employee Champions, made up of employees who are interested in leading social impact programming, connectivity, and fielding questions from their colleagues. We simply couldn’t have the breadth and depth of projects or impact without their commitment and hard work. 

We also have an incredible cohort of employees who participate in our Skills-Based Volunteering program. This program matches GitHub employees with nonprofit organizations to leverage their skills, time, and expertise to help solve technical (and sometimes non-technical) challenges. For example, a recent project with Comunidades Indígenas en liderazgo (CIELO; an indigenous women-led non-profit) saw employees work for months to build a Lotería game for children that helps them learn the endangered indigenous Zapotec language. Hear from the nonprofit themselves and watch a user learn the language here. 

This community engagement inspires me every day.

What is the most personally-gratifying aspect of working within Social Impact?  What motivates you to remain in the social impact field?

I’m most gratified in this work whenever I see a life truly improved, or an organization genuinely empowered or a community is significantly well-supported. I thrive on positive change and I’m reminded why I do this work. The good news is that we continue to move in the right direction with ever more people engaging in this space and building momentum. There are myriad examples of recent pioneering work and major breakthroughs, but there are also endless personal stories of lives changed for the better.

Let me share just one small example. Last year, we launched a pilot program, All In, with 30 students to create a pipeline for under-resourced students at HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), where they were trained in open source technology, guided to secure internships and eventually some of them coached into full time jobs. The pilot was a success and we’ll be scaling up to 5,000 students in the next couple of years.

And while we are focused on the growth and development of these types of high-impact programs, let me quickly share the story of Bernard.

He grew up in a small farming village in Zimbabwe with little access to connectivity. As a top performer, he was recruited to go to school in South Africa, but didn't have a laptop and could only use the computers for one hour per day all while dreaming of becoming an engineer. After applying for scholarships unsuccessfully to attend university, Bernard ended up in Dubai as a bricklayer. Working 14 hour days and at night, still applying for scholarships, one of which he finally received from St. Augustine’s College and where he discovered All In. Through the technical curriculum, he was able to pick up coding, and after 12 weeks he became one of the strongest coders in the class. Then, following his summer internship, was offered a full time role as a software engineer. 

I’m excited and motivated because I see an up-and-coming army of people who want to help even more Bernards get access to opportunity. There’s so much potential. 

Explore the Next Era of Social Impact

To discuss how your social impact priorities could be transformed through the Paragon One externship, talk to us. 

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates on the latest in CSR, social responsibility, and corporate leadership news and events.