On the latest episode of Changemakers from Within, we had the pleasure of chatting with Lindsey Clark, the Senior Partner of Social Impact at Pegasystems.
Pega is a leader in cloud software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Pega’s low-code application development platform allows enterprises to quickly build and evolve apps to meet their customer and employee needs and drive digital transformation on a global scale.
Laying the Foundations
Lindsey has had an admirable career in the social impact space for over seven years. After landing a job at a financial services company after graduation, she was introduced to the concept of corporate citizenship. From there, she charted her own path, by pivoting from a data and business development based career to the corporate social responsibility sphere. Lindsey gained several years of experience and laid the foundation for her success over the next six years, and landed her position as the Senior Partner for Social Impact at Pegasystems in January of this year.
Building out Unique CSR Programming
As a company, Pegasystems works with some of the most well known brands in the world to help optimize their customer interactions and drive digital transformation in their global operations. Their business model is unique – Pega’s platform is low code, so there’s no need to know all that computer science language that most systems alike require.
Lindsey came to Pega as the first employee in a dedicated CSR role. From there, it became her mission to both globalize and formalize the company’s social impact initiatives in a way that paralleled how unique Pega is itself.
Lindsey laid out two important steps that she took in order to establish Pega’s social impact programming.
- Listen: Lindsey listened to leadership, key stakeholders, employees that have engaged in volunteering in the past… as many people as she could. She uncovered what exactly people are interested in, the history of social responsibility at Pega, and what would make the most sense for the future of CSR at the company.
- Develop Key Pillars: After listening and reflecting on what is most important for Pega, Lindsey put together a plan. Pegasystem’s three key CSR pillars would include Women and Girls in Tech, Education and Youth Development, and Sustainability. Lindsey hoped that these pillars would tell a more cohesive story of Pegasystems as as a global organization.
An Unexpected Year
As every company can agree, 2020 has been a wild year.
Lindsey believes in a formalized local council of employees around the world at Pegasystems that are ultimately able to organize charitable events for their respective regions. Her hopes of integrating these councils with establishing a new tradition at Pega – the week of service – are now a little more complicated to plan.
However, the unforeseen path of 2020 hasn’t thrown off Lindsey’s momentum. In response to COVID-19, Pegasystems allowed their employees to pledge a percentage of their bonus towards relief efforts. Also, Pega forged a partnership with the Dropkick Murphys to sponsor a community fundraiser entitled “Steaming out of Fenway.” This event raised over $700,000 for COVID-19 relief.
It doesn’t even stop there. In response to George Floyd’s murder, Pegasystems has had important conversations surrounding racial inequity and how they can support the Black Lives Matter movement. For example, Pega supports two funds that assist tech entrepreneurs- the Black and Brown Founders, and Black Girl Ventures. Both of these organizations work with diverse tech entrepreneurs to give them access to capital in order to help launch and grow their tech businesses.
A Bright Future Ahead
Lindsey’s diverse background in social impact has created the perfect recipe for the future of CSR at Pegasystems. She shared with us that she’s been able to use her experience in more established programs to help grow this one.
Now, what’s next for CSR at Pega? Lindsey tells us that she dreams of establishing a self-sustaining model of employees participating and being aware of the programming. We have no doubts Lindsey will do just that and more!
