Combining Purpose with Platform: Inside Salesforce’s Pro Bono Fellowship 

At Salesforce, we don’t just see technology as a tool for business; we believe it holds immense power to drive positive change and address pressing issues. This belief is deeply embedded in our company’s DNA, expressed through our 1-1-1 model, where we dedicate 1% of our product, 1% of our equity, and 1% of our employees’ time to giving back.

This commitment is the foundation of the Salesforce Accelerator — Agents for Impact, an initiative designed to empower nonprofit organizations to confidently embrace AI, take calculated risks, and spark innovation in their crucial work. Our ultimate goal? To provide powerful proving ground for innovation, surfacing a clear blueprint for how AI can scale a mission. 

How nonprofits dream big with AI

The Salesforce Accelerator uplifts nonprofits beyond traditional approaches, encouraging them to innovate and be creative with Salesforce technology. The program’s support is built on the 1-1-1 model: flexible funding, donated Salesforce technology, and, critically, the pro bono expertise of our dedicated employees.

This means our commitment to giving back puts the right technology and the knowledge of how to use it into the hands of nonprofits. This model ensures no one is left behind in the agentic revolution.

The Pro Bono Fellowship, a cornerstone of the Salesforce Accelerator, is where Salesforce talent apply their skills for the greater good. These Fellows commit their time to nonprofits accepted into the Salesforce Accelerator. Over the course of a six month program, Fellows provide coaching and expertise to help nonprofits build an agentic solution that can propel their mission forward. This immersive experience creates a truly reciprocal impact: it not only provides critical support to nonprofits, but also gives our Fellows the opportunity to experiment with cutting edge technology and gain skills they can bring back to their own teams and customers.  

As Customer Success Manager, Emily Jakubiak shares, the program isn’t just about implementing a solution; it’s about building lasting capacity for our nonprofit partners. The organization that Emily partnered with was enabled to “not only implement an efficiency-boosting AI solution for their constituents but also skill up their internal team through self-implementation. Guided by our Pro Bono team and cohort resources, their admin was empowered to build the AI solution, even earning her Agentforce Specialist certification.” The program was intentionally designed this way. Volunteers may change, but building capacity for AI within the nonprofit is enduring. 

This focus on accelerated learning and impact results in significant professional and personal development for our Salesforce employees. 94% of volunteers said the Salesforce Accelerator helped them learn new skills — including expanding their skills in AI and Agentforce. Here’s what some of our volunteers had to say: 

• Deepened Skills and Confidence: “Participating in the Pro Bono Fellowship far exceeded my expectations in terms of my personal benefits, providing deep knowledge in managing AI implementations.” Emily Jakubiak learned to facilitate AI workshops and mitigate AI risks, which directly supported her in her Customer Success Manager ‘day job’ at Salesforce, boosting her confidence in discussing AI with customers.
• Personal and Professional Growth: Marcus Neal, Lead Technical Architect, reflected that the experience “reinforced the importance of listening, co-creating, and building technology that is human-centered from the ground up.”
• Strengthened Community: Harshini Jayaram, Director of AI Product, highlights that the Impact team fostered a truly wonderful community among the entire pro bono group, which “created an environment for shared learning, established an expert network we could mobilize for other strategic engagements, and made the overall experience more delightful.”

The outcomes above highlight the profound personal return on investment for our Fellows. In fact, 100% of our Fellows said that volunteering brought a sense of meaning and purpose to their everyday work. To understand the depth of their volunteer engagements we asked five incredible Salesforce employees to share the stories of their pro bono work, demonstrating how they truly combined purpose with platform.

Meet the changemakers: The Pro Bono Fellows

Over their six-month engagement, our Pro Bono Fellows partner deeply with nonprofits, using their specialized skills and Salesforce technology to innovate and deliver on the organization’s mission. Their work involves creative thinking about how our platform can address significant global challenges and drive real-world change. Let’s take a closer look at some of the strategic solutions and tangible impact these Fellows delivered:

Ben Mozenter, Lead Technical Architect, San Francisco

• Pro Bono for YMCA of San Diego County: The YMCA of San Diego County provides thousands of community programs to a bi-national community where over 100 languages are spoken With Agentforce, the Y is breaking down language and accessibility barriers for all 400,000 of its members. 
• The Work: As the Technical Architect on the project, Ben was focused on designing the solution to fit their existing technical architecture. The YMCA of San Diego County aimed to streamline their member management process by exploring how Agents could help guests identify and book programs. Ben’s prior experience with building agents was leveraged to provide insights into best practices around instructions, topics, and actions.
• The Impact and Learning: Ben found the most rewarding aspect was the reciprocal learning and growth. The accelerator is delivering a better member experience for the YMCA members and will reduce the burden on YMCA staff so they can focus on more impactful work. Ben was able to support the YMCA team, who quickly grasped the value of Data 360, built custom Data Graphs, and grew their understanding of generative AI throughout the program.

Emily Jakubiak, Customer Success Manager, Syracuse

• Pro Bono for InsideTrack: InsideTrack is a nonprofit dedicated to helping learners achieve their education and career goals through powerful coaching, supporting over 200,000 learners annually.
• The Work: Emily served as the Pro Bono project manager for InsideTrack’s AI for Impact Accelerator. She was responsible for prepping and facilitating weekly meetings, leading workshops focused on change management, and supporting other activities to develop the solution. InsideTrack’s challenge was to develop AI-generated summaries of meeting notes to improve coach preparation, with future plans to use AI for trend categorization and next-step solutions.
• The Impact and Learning: Today, InsideTrack uses Salesforce’s GenAI tool, PromptBuilder, to enhance their coaches’ preparation for over 2.2 million annual learner interactions by providing clear, thorough summaries of meeting notes.  Emily’s participation provided deep knowledge in managing AI implementations, which she brought back to her Customer Success Manager role, boosting her confidence in discussing AI with customers.

Harshini Jayaram, Director, AI Product, San Francisco 

• Pro Bono for Rare: Rare is nonprofit focused on community-led solutions to protect nature and build resilient communities. With Agentforce, Rare is rolling out a regenerative agriculture coach to deliver real-time, localized guidance to smallholder farmers tailored to their crops, soils, and local agro-ecological conditions.
• The Work: As a Director of AI Product at Salesforce, Harshini project managed the engagement, guiding the Rare team through the Agentforce Agent development process and sharing best practices. Rare’s challenge was to scale their impact by finding a more efficient way for their Extension Specialists and on-the-ground mentors, known as ‘profes,’ to onboard new farmers and deliver critical guidance in a faster, more personalized way.
• The Impact and Learning: This work is poised to have an immense and transformative impact. Rare’s agent, “Agent Tierra,” delivers real-time, localized guidance to smallholder farmers tailored to their crops, soils, and local agro-ecological conditions. Harshini noted that the work helped her think about Agentforce in new ways, as the project involved serving populations that are often not literate, creating new requirements on how to reach and interact with the end user, and meeting users in the channel where they are, like WhatsApp.

Marcus Neal, Lead Technical Architect, Dallas 

• Pro Bono for Compass Working Capital: Compass Working Capital is a nonprofit focused on partnering with families with low incomes to build assets as a pathway out of poverty. With Agentforce, they’re building a financial coaching assistant to support families building economic stability.
• The Work: Marcus served as the Technical  Architect, responsible for assessing existing systems, designing scalable solutions, and implementing Agentforce and Data 360. Compass aimed to enhance their financial coaching model by developing an Employee Agent integrated with Salesforce to help coaches access real-time insights and deliver more personalized support.
• The Impact and Learning: The work laid the foundation for Compass Working Capital to roll out a Financial Coaching agent that expands access to financial coaching and increases coach efficiency. This scalability will accelerate Compass Working Capital’s goal to help over 15,000 low-income families. For Marcus, the most rewarding part was “seeing the nonprofit staff light up when they realized how much time and manual effort we could save them using Agentforce.”

Mia Kunst, Customer Success Manager, Senior Manager, Washington

• Pro Bono for Blue Star Families: Blue Star Families is an organization that helps military families feel connected and supported in their communities, serving more than 1.5 million family members globally.
• The Work: Mia served as the Project Manager, partnering with Blue Star Families to build out the project scope and timeline, track progress, and serve as a liaison between the BSF team and the Salesforce team. Their agent, named “STAR” (Save Time and Resources), is designed to help Blue Star Families staff to streamline their work, improve data quality, and help new staff to ramp up more quickly.
• The Impact and Learning: The agent will empower Blue Star Families’ staff to offload tedious manual work like data entry and instead focus their time and skills on raising funds and delivering services to even more military families. Mia reflected that the Pro Bono Fellowship has been the highlight of her year, leaving every meeting feeling “so inspired by the work that the nonprofits in the program are doing.”

Blue Star Families Dreamforce Session

Driving Change, Together

The Salesforce Accelerator program and our Pro Bono Fellows are at the forefront of fostering innovation and addressing critical global challenges. This program embodies Salesforce’s core values and deep commitment to making a positive impact on the world through our 1-1-1 model, reinforcing our belief that business is the greatest platform for change.

Inspired by these stories and ready to make an impact? Explore opportunities to get involved with Salesforce’s pro bono initiatives on the Impact Exchange and learn more about the Salesforce Accelerator. 

Don’t forget: You can also brush up on your pro bono skills and prepare for your own impactful project with our Pro Bono Project Management Trailhead.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.