Česko.Digital

Programs and initiatives: Activating digital citizenship

Česko.Digital (CD) is an established Czech Republic- based non-profit organization linking expert volunteers with civil society and public-sector organizations that require additional capacity to improve digital citizen services. CD has more than 5000 volunteers in its network and through its projects - 16 ongoing and nine already completed - it is delivering impact to more than four million individuals.

Avast Foundation is supporting CD as a financial partner, with a one year grant that began in December 2021. The supported project will see the creation and implementation of a new volunteer portal that aims to simplify the volunteer journey and increase efficiency and engagement, thereby increasing the scale of volunteer impact. This responds directly to requests of existing volunteers and to CD’s recognition that these improvements will enable the organization’s growth and increase its capability to deliver additional value to the public sector.

Alongside this work,CD aims to develop the civic-tech community within the Czech Republic by creating opportunities to develop tech innovation leadership, connect with organizations outside of the Czech ecosystem, and find opportunities to use the expert skills through increased employee engagement of Avast’s and other partners’staff.

CD was among several first-responding organizations to begin coordinating and connecting the myriad voluntary services cropping up across the country following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although this was hugely labor intensive, CD CEO Eva Pavlikova shared that under the circumstances,“Our current partnership with Avast Foundation has many facets and is already bringing lots of added value, including expert volunteering, where Avast staff support our projects, and joint Mastermind sessions, where project management experts share their knowledge with representatives from the public sector and NGOs. We’re also now finalizing our new Volunteer Portal, which has already tremendously simplified our project administration around the provisioning of help for Ukraine and all migrants affected by the war, projects which were obviously unanticipated by are now highly impactful.”

The organization’s communications and activities to begin provisioning needed technical support related to Ukraine garnered significant attention. Volunteer registration to CD’s platform increased from 4616 in December 2021 to 5420 by March 2022. Moving forward in 2022,CD aims to launch activities with international dimensions within the global civic-tech community.

Avast Foundation is now part of Giving@Gen

On September 12, 2022, Avast merged with NortonLifeLock, Inc., and a successor company, Gen, was launched. Gen is a global company powering Digital Freedom through consumer brands including Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner. Gen’s vision is to big vision to power Digital Freedom by protecting consumers and giving them control of their digital lives. Gen’s philanthropy and corporate responsibility program, Giving@Gen, is a big part of that mission, and will draw on the legacy of Avast Foundation and NortonLifeLock Cares programs.

To learn more about Giving@Gen, please visit Gen’s corporate responsibility website.

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