 live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Oracle Open World this is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, founder and co-CEO of Silicon Angle Media, next to us calling Cassidy. Oracle Citizenship, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you, delighted to be here. You are such a special person. One, you're just radiating energy, love that. But more importantly, you really are doing amazing work with Oracle. Most notable in the press recently is DTAC, the high school charter program that you guys have been part of. Here on the Oracle campus, and I think the story I read, Stafford Castle, I think we own that land over there. Let's give it a... That's one of many things that you guys are doing. And we'll get into a second, but let's talk about what you guys do. Quickly get, spend a minute and talk about what you guys are doing relative to Oracle giving and also citizenship. Sure, so Oracle Corporate Citizenship encompasses a variety of activities, one of which is running our business in the most sustainable and responsible way that we possibly can. But beyond that, there's genuine philanthropy and that takes a few different forms. So the Oracle Education Foundation is a nonprofit funded by Oracle and its board of directors is chaired by Safra Katz. That's the entity through which we engage Oracle employees in coaching high school students through these really immersive multi-day workshops and we're piloting that program with Design Tech High School. So that's where that relationship resides. In addition to that, we have a really robust Oracle giving program, which is our corporate grant-making program. It gives tens of millions of dollars to nonprofit and non-governmental organizations around the world annually in three areas, which include education with a really strong emphasis on computer science education and STEAM. Environmental protection that includes the natural world and wildlife and community, which is health, human services, poverty alleviation. And then we have such an enormous base of employees that's something like 140,000 worldwide and tens of thousands of them volunteer every year. So they co-develop projects with nonprofits and NGOs and execute them. I think we had 28,000 employees participate in the last 12 months. Well, a lot of folks don't know that SiliconANGLE Media has a nonprofit called TechTruth as part of the Brown Truth Project, which really is a philanthropy fellowship model. But this is a shift in generational gaps of people. You're seeing a new generation, certainly the younger folks getting in the industry. They don't really, I shouldn't say they don't care about making money, but it used to be in the 80s. Green is good. Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, you know, okay. But now it's really different. You're seeing a different, can you share any data on that? Are you seeing the same things? The kind of involvement, any trends in giving, whether it's volunteering or actually just nonprofit? Well, one of the things that we see not only among our students, but also among our younger employees, millennials, is a real commitment to trying to improve matters in the world, right? To make the world a better place. So it's not simply about gain for yourself. It's also about a sense of purpose in your work and a sense of efficacy in terms of your positive impact on the world. We definitely see that with the high school students that we're working with too. And one of the things that's so special about Design Tech High School is that its mission is to develop students who believe the world can be a better place and that they are the ones who can make it so. So to teach them the skills along with that sense of efficacy, that they can be the designers of solutions to the world's problems. Education is really one of the hottest issues in every election even more than ever now. Can you take a minute, just talk about how the D-Tech and how the nonprofit of the educational group that you founded came to be. How did you guys decide that, hey, we're Oracle. We're a corporation. We have some extra land. We're going to build a charter ice school. Take us through that, play by play. What, how did it happen? Sure, sure. So if we, we got to go back to 2000 for the Genesis of the Oracle Education Foundation. It was the idea of Larry Ellison and, and Safra Katz and a wonderful man named Dan Cooperman. The foundation has always had a focus on teaching young people, computer science and technology and creativity. And it's always had an emphasis on underserved populations. So that includes girls and students of color are significantly underserved populations in these dimensions of education and careers. As far as the relationship between the foundation and D-Tech and how this current state of affairs which is so wonderful came to be, we had moved into the process of creating a new mission program for the foundation just over two years ago. We had sunset the program we'd run for the prior 10 years, took a little break, stepped back, wanted to think about what we do next. And the board of directors of the foundation got together for a holiday dinner in the winter of 2013 and it was just supposed to be that. It was just supposed to be a social dinner. And instead- So wine was pouring and, you know? Exactly, and instead Safra walked in and she had just come from Washington DC and she was, she was a little bit steamed. She was saying, you know, I just came from DC. Everybody talks about education and the need to improve things in the United States. But I don't really see anybody doing very much and I want us to do something. And she said, we have wonderful people. I really want our people to be involved. And I have amazing jobs. And really we don't have enough young people graduating from universities here in the States to fill them. What can we do about that? And what followed was about a three hour conversation that started to give rise to the bones of what would become our new program. But at the staff level, we realized that the thing we needed to do to truly develop a good program was to engage our users. So Safra had identified one group of users for us, which is Oracle employees, Oracle volunteers. That was a group of users. We had also determined that high school was going to be our sweet spot because your Oracle, your teaching technology at a certain level- You can make the most impression at that level. You can make the most impression there. Elementary school kids not going to be the greatest place for us to engage, right? High school is a really good place for us to engage. And so because we are design thinkers at the Oracle Education Foundation, we realized it was a design challenge. So we brought together our user groups, Oracle employees, nine different high schools from the Bay Area, very diverse high schools, put them all in a room together with a facilitator from a company called Lime Design for eight hours. And we had them rapidly prototype potential elements of our new mission program with us. And among those nine schools were four members of the founding team of Design Tech High School. This was May of 2014. D-Tech, which is the nickname of the school, had not even opened its doors yet. It would open in August of 2014. And they were so extraordinary and they were such good design thinkers because design thinking is core to the model that we recognize them as the organization that we wanted to partner with in this program. And a lot of the jobs that are going to be out there haven't been invented yet. That's right. There's no curriculum for them. That's right. So it's part of the vision for the interdisciplinary and Stanford has been very progressive in this. Absolutely. Is that a big part of it? It's a huge part of it. So the most, you need to understand subject matter and have a broad knowledge base, obviously, all of us do. But more importantly than that, you need to be a lifelong learner and you need to have a sense of self-direction and self-efficacy that whatever new thing it is that I need to learn to adapt to changing situations, I can learn that. Whatever problem or challenge you may encounter, I can be the designer of a solution to that problem. You got to give props to Stafford Katz on this one because a lot of athletes can be like mailing, oh yeah, I donated to that cause, you check the box. There's a real intersection between a core business problem by hiring people for jobs. Right. Yeah. What a great win-win. Exactly. And at the same time, it's this beautiful blend of completely authentic philanthropy because there's a leap of faith here, right? There are no strings attached. These students from Design Tech High School, they don't have to come to work for us or for our partners. It's a genuine investment in developing people who are gonna be really good citizens of global society and are gonna be really effective for the need. And I think this is a real progressive move by Oracle. I think other people should follow and will follow in my opinion. Yeah, we hope they do. We started the Tech Truth as a fellowship for journalists and we think philanthropy will fund journalism too. This does not enough jobs for real journalists so we're training our own. It's true. So this authentic philanthropy is a huge deal. Agreed. Thank you so much for sharing here on theCUBE, Colleen. What a great mission. Check out Oracle's educational nonprofit. Of course, there's Citizenship and the D-Tech, the design school that's gonna be on their campus, Oracle giving back with authentic philanthropy. This is theCUBE doing our share of sharing the authentic content with the original content. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more after this short break.