ActNow Coalition

Act Now is a non-profit that builds innovative and user-friendly data products to address today's urgent problems. Our multidisciplinary team draws on engineering, design, policy, and media expertise. We believe that accurate, accessible, and actionable data is critical to help leaders and individuals make impactful decisions.

Our initial work on COVID helped provide tens of millions of people, governments at all levels and small and large enterprises with accessible, actionable and transparent COVID data and analysis. We are continuing to expand this work in partnership with major international NGOs today.

We work hard, but we also prioritize work-life balance. We have a 4-day workweek from M-Th, and are fully remote, with team members across the country and in Canada. Our team operates on flexible schedules that accommodate our personal lives, whether that’s blocking off time for caretaking responsibilities or for wellbeing activities. A strong foundation of trust means that everyone does what is needed and we don’t need to dictate how. We have an unlimited PTO policy, combined with 16 holidays per year. We also conduct quarterly team engagement surveys to check our team’s well being and satisfaction at work and we make changes accordingly.

Although remote and a fairly young organization, we have several much-loved traditions, like our Valentines Day card competition, monthly social events and game nights.

We also have a number of social Slack channels, where we share our passions outside of work, such as time with family and friends, dogs, cats, food, plants, clouds and the fact that a lot of us, an awful lot of us, drive Subarus 😊

Act Now is made up of people-centered problem solvers: technologists, designers, advocates, scientists, storytellers, and organizers from many different backgrounds striving to maintain a collaborative culture.

We strive to be inclusive—a place people can grow and freely share their ideas. Everyone is welcome to pitch new ideas and lead initiatives that align with overall goals and objectives that are set collaboratively with leadership, and partners. For example, our product development teams use pair programming, daily stand-ups, all team product review meetings, and user research to ensure we are on track to do our best work.

We do not only think that diverse and inclusive teams bring the best creativity in solving difficult societal challenges, as we do, but we also believe they are the most fun in providing the right environment for personal growth and exposure. We try really hard to build and design inclusive digital products with a specific focus on vulnerable communities, low-income families and minorities. This is reflected in our partnerships, content and analysis.

We are a data driven organization, and while our data does not reflect yet the level of diversity we would like to see in our team, we are keeping a close eye to our numbers. JEDI is something the organization is continually improving on. We have just started sharing our open positions as widely as possible and extending them out beyond our networks. We include multiple team members in our hiring process to ensure a more fair review, and do not rush to fill open positions. We have a Slack channel specifically named #CAN-be-DEI, because we know there is always room to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive and we are in the process of identifying areas for improvement.

Act Now is a team of hungry minded individuals. We have several channels in Slack dedicated to fostering personal growth and development, and share external resources and educational materials. Every team member has weekly 1:1 meetings with their respective manager and establishes goals and objectives early on to ensure people are staying motivated to improve and grow. We come together to learn from each other, and learn from various external experts and well-known personalities in their fields, at our all-hands speaker series, our demo days, internal TedTalk videos, and our annual off-sites.