PagerDuty.org’s Third Impact Accelerator Cohort of Crisis Helpline and Crisis Response Organizations Advances Time-Critical Health Outcomes Around the World

A timely digital connection can be a lifeline at just the right moment for someone experiencing a mental health or personal safety crisis at home, work or school. For organizations that provide these services, a robust digital infrastructure is essential for coordinating a prompt response when people and communities need to connect with a crisis counselor through text message or interact face-to-face with a front-line responder deployed to their location.

Since the inception of PagerDuty.org in 2019, we have funded organizations aligned with our time-critical health focus area to support tech-forward organizations working to improve health outcomes for historically underserved communities. PagerDuty plays a unique role by increasing access to critical, quality care by providing holistic support, including access to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, to help enable non-profits to fulfill their mission.

Today, we are excited to share that nine organizations comprise PagerDuty.org’s third Impact Accelerator Cohort to advance equitable health outcomes through crisis text and chat lines, and response services. Through this program, these tech-forward organizations will receive holistic support from PagerDuty, which include general operating funding, product credits, technical pro bono support from our employees and impact storytelling. Over the next 12 months, each organization will leverage the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to transform incident management, automate manual tasks, and triage and prioritize urgent issues to ensure that their critical services are available 24/7 and their organizational resources are focused on their community impact.

Learn more about our partnership below and how each organization leverages digital-first technologies to transform access to timely, critical care across the globe.

Meet The Partners

Crisis Text Line is a leading nonprofit organization that provides free, 24/7, confidential text-based mental health support in English and Spanish by texting HELLO or HOLA to 741741. Since its launch in 2013, the organization has supported over 9 million conversations in the United States and more than 12 million globally together with its affiliates in Canada, the UK, and Ireland. Crisis Text Line has trained over 74,000 volunteers who provide support for individuals facing various challenges, including stress, anxiety, loneliness, isolation, difficult relationships, bullying, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts.

PagerDuty’s grant will help Crisis Text Line scale impact over the next 12 months by funding key factors that will enable them to expand their services internationally. This includes critical components for going global, such as investing in worldwide infrastructure for reliable services, tailoring services to different languages and cultures, optimizing for mobile devices due to their global use, ensuring user data is protected with strong security, improving team communication with collaboration tools, using scalable technology to support growth, and enhancing user experience through better performance and localization.

Empower Work is a national nonprofit that provides a free, confidential text line focused on improving the well-being for historically marginalized workers. Their unique coaching and resources that meet workers where they are supports increased confidence, clarity, agency, empowerment, and economic security – all rooted in equity. Over 94% report improved mental health and over 80% improved financial security.

With a goal of serving three million vulnerable workers over the next two years, PagerDuty’s investment will help Empower Work leverage AI to enhance and grow their service. Through an AI alert system, Empower Work aims to seamlessly streamline critical escalation points for thousands of people in need. Pairing technology with deeply human connection ensures the people they serve have everything they need to stay connected to and advance in good jobs and successful careers that will ultimately lead to improved mental health and economic well-being. 

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health advocacy organization and the NAMI HelpLine is a cornerstone of their work, providing free, nationwide peer-support service, information, resource referrals, and support to people living with a mental health condition, their family members and caregivers, mental health providers and the public. NAMI’s programs reach people across the United States through their network of more than 600 local affiliates and 49 state organizations.

With the holistic support from PagerDuty, NAMI aims to strengthen its technology infrastructure to improve its program efficiency and effectiveness and increase its organizational capacity. This funding will enable NAMI to invest in upgrading their systems, implementing new software solutions, or enhancing cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive data. Furthermore, the grant will help enhance their monitoring and evaluation processes, allowing them to better track their progress, measure their impact accurately, and make data-informed decisions about where to allocate resources for maximum impact. Overall, the support will help strengthen NAMI’s foundation, expand its reach, and continuously improve its offerings to better serve the community.

SameSame Collective is a nonprofit organization based in both South Africa and the United States working to support the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTQI+ youth through private, secure digital touchpoints to share critical information and connect them to locally-available services. SameSame works with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy experts to create evidence-backed activities that help users set goals, fight depression and anxiety, deal with stress, and overcome both internal and external homo- and transphobia so that the youth can achieve their full potential.

Support from PagerDuty will be instrumental in enhancing and scaling the impact of SameSame’s WhatsApp chatbot service, providing a virtual lifeline to LGBTQI+ youth. By integrating PagerDuty’s automation tools, they also aim to enhance their operational efficiency and optimize their back-end processes, allowing their staff to focus more time on core activities such as program development and direct user engagement at this critical time of growth for the organization.

Tech Matters is on a mission to make the benefits of technology available to all of humanity. Over the past five years, Tech Matters has partnered closely with the crisis helpline sector and Jeroo Billimoria of the One Family Foundation (and founder of Childline India and Child Helpline International) to develop Aselo, a cloud-based, open source, contact center system for child helplines. Aselo has expanded to power over 15 helplines globally, on every inhabited continent, ranging from developing to developed economies during the past three years. 

With PagerDuty’s support, Tech Matters will continue to invest in Aselo’s processes, monitoring, and infrastructure to ensure the core technology is robust. The funding will also allow Tech Matters to continue supporting their existing helpline partners in a cost-effective and sustainable way, growing their impact in terms of young people assisted and countries reached.

Trek Medics International is transforming access to emergency response networks in global communities. Trek Medics relies on the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to ensure its internal response systems are always online and its users maintain critical response services for Beacon, their cloud-based dispatch platform for emergency services and crisis response organizations around the world. 

With ongoing support for PagerDuty, Trek Medics continues to make progress toward revenue-based financial sustainability, which will enable them to provide continuous, uninterrupted product maintenance and support to their customers, and to scale their impact by adding new product features and investing in key crisis response partnerships.

The Trevor Project is the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people. The organization provides free, 24/7 crisis intervention services LGBTQ+ young people, and operates innovative research, public education, advocacy, and peer support programs. 

Currently, The Trevor Project relies on PagerDuty to notify their team of any work-stoppage issue that could impact the support services, ensuring a response within five minutes or less. The general operating grant from PagerDuty will help ensure they continue to provide 24/7 crisis intervention services, safe online community spaces, scholarly research, and advocacy services. Their team is also developing services to connect their front-line counselors and online moderators with real-time, “just-in-time” resources to improve outcomes of those utilizing their services for crisis intervention.

Turn.io and PagerDuty first became partners in 2021 as part of our $1M deployment to support organizations working to close the COVID-19 global equity vaccine gap. A social enterprise and current PagerDuty customer, Turn.io drives equitable access to healthcare by providing digital communication tools for nonprofit organizations such as the World Health Organization and health ministries across Africa, South-East Asia, and Latin America. Trusted by more than 250 social impact organizations and reaching over 34 million people globally, Turn.io plans to expand its reach to support 50 million people by 2027.

PagerDuty’s impact investment – a powerful tool in which investment dollars are used to spur progressive change and meaningful social impact – was made into Turn.io in FY24 to support their efforts to expand their team and 8x their impact by late 2025. The investment will enable Turn.io to collaborate with more health-focused organizations and amplify the number of life-improving conversations supported through its services.

Turn.io continues to leverage PagerDuty to expand and launch tools that utilize familiar digital channels, including WhatsApp, to provide vulnerable, disempowered and minority communities across the globe with easy and secure access to trusted information, empathetic support and vital services.

Youth ALIVE! is breaking the cycle of violence and uplifting community leaders through prevention, intervention, healing, and advocacy. A PagerDuty customer since 2021, they have used PagerDuty’s Incident Management product to transform a manual solution with a single gatekeeper and significant stress, to an automated solution that enables pertinent information to flow automatically and immediately to the right response teams. This has helped ensure nearly 100% of violence victims were not rehospitalized. 

Over the next 12 months, PagerDuty will support their long-term strategy to reduce youth street violence and deaths by conducting mediations to interrupt violence, completing safety assessments of shooting victims, and maintaining a 3% re-injury rate post-violence, against a national average of 44%.

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At PagerDuty.org, we empower mission-driven teams to build a more equitable world and sustainable future. We understand this work requires a commitment to long-term systems change which is why we continue to invest in our partners through our Impact Accelerator program. To learn more about our global impact commitments and journey, please explore our Impact Hub.