Words by Smiley Team
Since Covid-19 drove everyone into lockdown, Zoom became integral to tackling loneliness and for businesses to continue functioning. But the company’s positive social impact goes beyond offering just a tool to communicate. Brought up in Detroit by parents who migrated from Iran, Roxana Shirkhoda, is applying her passion for driving equality as Zoom’s newly-appointed head of social impact. We spoke to her about how she arrived in the role and her plans for the company going forward.
The duality of my lived experiences, and of those proximate to me, are what shaped my personal and professional journey.
I was raised in the suburbs of Detroit, where the city’s history was both rich with Motown music and a booming auto industry, while simultaneously scarred with redlining, segregation, and race riots. I grew up listening to stories of my mother and father’s migration from Iran to the United States where they advanced their education and career opportunities, all the while fending off classmates singing to the tune of “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” My first job out of college was a welcomed chance to stay afloat during the financial crisis, and yet I quickly learned my male peers were being paid more than I was for the same role.
It was these experiences that led me to a career in social impact–one where I could try to tip the scales of a seemingly bifurcated world towards racial, ethnic, and gender justice. My path to Zoom includes a mixture of roles that allowed me to understand diverse perspectives across the spectrum of ‘doing good.’ I have held roles purely focused on business outcomes domestically, led corporate global grantmaking programs internationally, sat on nonprofit boards to advise on strategy, led academic design-thinking research, been the first employee at a start-up company, and built teams from scratch within institutional philanthropy.
As you can tell I am curious, I love to build, and I thrive when problem-solving. Which made Zoom the perfect home for me.
As the head of social impact, I have the opportunity to mobilize our company’s resources for good. This means I get to design and implement a strategy that mobilizes our dollars, our platform, our people, and our voice for positive change.
What makes my role particularly energizing is how much each and every stakeholder I partner with throughout the company genuinely cares. Care is our core value at Zoom–we care for our company, customers, teammates, ourselves, and our communities.
My aim is to tap into this abundance of company spirit and ensure that we are listening to nonprofit and community leaders on the ground, around the world. I am focused on understanding their most pressing needs and collaborating to resource timely solutions.
At this particularly unique juncture in history where our communities are experiencing dual pandemics of the COVID-19 crisis as well as a racial reckoning, compounded by a climate crisis, my role is focused on furthering progress across social equity, education, and sustainability.
To date, Zoom has taken a deliberate and focused approach to support education. We believe access to high-quality learning opportunities is a fundamental right for all individuals. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of students lost nearly a year of learning– widening achievement gaps for low-income and marginalized students already facing barriers to progress due to systemic inequities.
In leveraging our product for good–we provided training and resources to help more than 35,000 educators teach remotely via Zoom as part of our Zoom Summer Academy. And we are providing Zoom for free to more than 125,000 school domains in 25 countries during this continued time of distance learning.
Inputting our financial resources towards education–we have invested over $2.5 million to help ensure students are connected, safe, and learning during these times. Our grants support organizations globally that are helping students disproportionately affected by school closures, as well as college graduates developing new job skills to remain competitive in a challenging economic environment.
Most recently we announced our EdInnovation Awards. Zoom invited education leaders across the globe to submit their best, most ambitious ideas for improving student outcomes. Through this process, we learned about phenomenal organizations helping to address challenges that were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, including learning loss, job loss, racial inequity, and remote living.
Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts are led by our incredible DEI team. Though still early in our journey, the team has already had a chance to learn with amazing leaders and forge impactful partnerships, such as our Race in the Workplace series with TIME and our five-year, $1.2 million partnership with Claflin University, a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). We’ve also used our platform to engage the broader community on issues like voter equity through our ‘Zoom Where it Happens’ series spearheaded by a group of leading Black women artists.
Part of our focus internally has involved supporting our own employees’ efforts to promote DEI through the formation of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) focused on our Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+, women, and veterans communities. Our ERGs are partnering to bring new experiences and education to our work and personal lives.
We are intentional about lending our support to help advance the mission of organizations and programs that are helping create equity and advance justice for communities who need it most. Our social impact and DEI teams have collaboratively funded organizations including the Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP Empowerment Program, Association for the Study of African American Life & History, and Black Lives Matter Global Network.
Additionally, we have provided grants to organizations fighting racial injustice in our own Bay Area backyard, including Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus and Asian Americans for Community Involvement.
Emerging as such a vital tool during the pandemic, Zoom and the team behind it clearly take its role as an instrument for positive change very seriously. Many enjoy their service as an online communication platform, but few will know about their socially-conscious strategy to help communities.
