Unbound

Unbound is an international nonprofit based in Kansas City with an ambitious goal of bringing people together to challenge poverty in new and innovative ways in 19 countries around the world.

The organization differs from the typical child sponsorship charity in that they sponsor a range of people from children to elders. In fact, they are one of the only organizations to offer sponsorships to the elderly. “At Unbound, our mission is to walk with the poor and marginalized of the world, and we do that by providing personal attention and direct benefits to children, youth, elders and their families so they may live with dignity, achieve their inherent potential and participate fully in society,” explains John Dougherty, the Director of Technology Services for Unbound. “We invite people of goodwill to live in daily solidarity with the world’s poor through one-to-one sponsorship. We sponsor close to 300,000 people, yet our impact reaches more than a million people around the world. By sponsoring a child or an elder, you are essentially helping an entire family.”

Unbound offers a highly personalized program designed to leverage the skills of the global poor while meeting their unique needs. This means each family identifies their own obstacles, sets their own goals and charts their own course out of poverty.

Since Unbound provides direct cash transfers to families around the world, it’s essential that they have a reliable and secure platform to collect and distribute these funds. The organization applied for Project Galileo in order to improve their general security posture, and to secure their public-facing website and the custom-built web-facing applications used by staff in the 19 countries the organization operates in.

“We first used Cloudflare Access to help protect to protect the admin side of the website for many of our staff members”, says Dougherty. In March 2020, due to the spread of COVID-19, Dougherty and the IT team had one week to implement a secure work-from-home solution for their staff. “We needed a way for our staff to access the organization’s internal ticketing system, help desk, and knowledge base in a simple and reliable manner. Now, more than 150 users can easily access the services they need to continue to provide support to those in need.”

With Project Galileo, the organization has the ability to focus on their mission of helping others while not having to worry about data breaches or being taken offline. Dougherty explains, “Project Galileo has given us the ability to leverage technology to help us operate in a lean and efficient way. Anytime Unbound receives these types of services to secure our website and not have to worry as much about being taken offline due to a cyber attack or have sensitive information compromised, we can spend more time and money on providing direct support to families living in extreme poverty.”