Opening Doors to What's Possible

As I travel around the country, people frequently ask me about the difference we hope to make by investing in our communities at Comcast NBCUniversal. I tell them that we work each and every day to open doors to opportunity so children and their families achieve better lives and communities prosper.

Indeed, that is the goal at the center of our new five-year partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Through a transformative technology initiative called My.Future, the 4,100 Clubs now have a cutting-edge way to engage children and teach Club members the skills needed to thrive in today’s digital world. With the potential to reach about 4 million children a year, My.Future is the latest in our efforts to bridge the digital divide through hands-on technology education.

Our ongoing support of this and other partnerships, and our year-round commitment to giving back, led Comcast NBCUniversal in December to be named one of the nation’s most community-minded companies for the second consecutive year. The Civic 50, a survey conducted by Points of Light and Bloomberg, measures corporate civic engagement and recognizes companies that incorporate socially responsible practices and community leadership into their culture. Giving back responsibly is something we talk about every day at Comcast NBCUniversal, and we are honored to be recognized for our efforts.

You can see this notion at work when you look at just how we invest in our communities.

• About one in three of the organizations we fund receives more than one form of support from our company, such as airtime for public service announcements combined with volunteer service from our employees.

• We use our core competency as a company to tackle the important national challenge of bridging the digital divide, driving us to reach more than 1.75 million people through our local and national nonprofit community partners and invest more than $200 million in cash and in-kind support to help fund digital literacy and readiness initiatives since 2011. 

• More than half our employees pledged their support to our annual United Way campaign, which provided $9 million to support our local communities this year.

We’re also very excited to share another honor. Since 2008, we have seen Beyond School Walls grow from a workplace mentoring program with about 35 employees at our company headquarters in Philadelphia to the nation’s largest workplace mentoring program. Today, about 325 of our employees serve as role models to children in 15 cities across the country. Thanks to their efforts and our investment in Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Comcast NBCUniversal has been selected to receive the Corporate Mentoring Challenge Award for excellence and commitment to quality youth mentoring by MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership.

These recognitions emphasize something we have long embraced in our Community Investment strategy – our best efforts come to life when our employees are at the helm. Through this issue of Inside CI, you’ll learn more about the impact our employees make in our communities, and how they help us bring our partnerships with impactful community-based organizations to life.

As we kickstart 2015, we look forward to opening more doors to more opportunities.

Sincerely,

Charisse R. Lillie
Vice President, Community Investment, Comcast Corporation
President, Comcast Foundation

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