I’m a director-level engineering manager of cybersecurity at a fintech company.

I also sit on the boards of two charities: a homeless charity that mostly does step down care & longer term outreach services and a fairly niche ecological charity that takes down & executes environmental grants & organises cleanups and such.

The larger of the two (the homeless charity) has a fairly big (big for them) tech focused project around IT refurbishment, and I provide specifically cybersecurity input: essentially I advise the other (mostly non-technical) board members on cybersecurity risk & give some direction & training to the volunteers who actually do their IT stuff. It’s a few weekends per year of commitment in practice - researching, preparing materials, training etc.

For the smaller (ecological) charity I take a more active role & while I’m a “board member” I’m essentially the IT guy who just happens to have corporate leadership experience so they also roll me out for the odd externally facing meeting to look official. That’s maybe a few hours per week or 10-15 hours per month commitment.

Usually we jump on a call every Wednesday evening to do planning, and I’ll do a few hours after that. The odd weekend I’ll spend a weekend afternoon updating our web-app, fixing someone’s laptop or making phone calls to volunteers for this or that.

I do it because it’s different from my current job, is refreshing, and makes me feel like I’m not entirely a shill in the soulless machinery of late stage capitalism. It’s also a good way to make friends.