Volunteerism and Service: How Our Employees Make Meaningful Impact in Their Communities

Tina Simmons has spent two decades at Comcast NBCUniversal leading human resources and customer service teams. For nearly all of those years, she has also lent her deep expertise and skills to nonprofit boards — first as a volunteer director with the Urban League of Philadelphia and now as a Boys & Girls Club of America National Trustee in the Southeast Region.

“Something I see with many nonprofit boards and staff is the need for more support from those with hands-on business experience,” says Simmons. “They are terrific fundraisers, but they are sometimes missing the management, operational, and leadership skills that can be more easily attained from working in a corporate environment.”

Simmons is just one of thousands of Comcast NBCUniversal employees who contribute to our company’s culture of volunteerism and service, donating their time and talents on nonprofit boards and in myriad other ways that deliver meaningful impact. We continue to strengthen the legacy of service that has defined our company since it was founded by Ralph Roberts in 1963. And by creating more opportunities for our people to contribute their time and give to the causes they care about, we are helping to strengthen the communities where our employees work and live.

“From our Comcast Cares employee volunteerism program — which reaches more than 1,000 nonprofits in 23 countries worldwide — to ongoing mentorship initiatives to our new nonprofit board training program, we focus on making a positive difference every day,” says Dalila Wilson-Scott, Senior Vice President for Community Impact at Comcast Corporation and President of the Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation. “We aspire to connect our best resource — our passionate employees — to causes and organizations they care about as individuals.”

NBCUniversal employees have demonstrated their passion for making a difference in our local communities through Comcast NBCUnites, a new volunteering and social impact program that launched in early 2019. According to Hilary Smith, Executive Vice President of Corporate Communications and Social Impact at NBCUniversal, “Our primary goal is to help employees give back through projects focused on building stronger communities, empowering the next generation of storytellers, and promoting media and technology skills. In just one year, more than 14,000 employees impacted 225 nonprofit organizations through a wide variety of projects, ranging from mentoring to food packing to hosting a Creative Summit for aspiring young filmmakers.”

Through the Creative Summit, held in partnership with Ghetto Film School, more than 125 NBCUniversal employees were paired with young people in New York and Los Angeles for one-on-one mentoring and workshops in news, production, and late-night TV writing.

Just as our talented film and television teams share their skills with aspiring filmmakers, Comcast’s technologists and engineers are also helping the next generation explore tech careers. In 2019, we continued our partnership with CS4Philly, a coalition advocating for teaching computer science in Philadelphia schools, by mentoring high school students in a hands-on tech exploration day through coding, data analytics, and other activities.

For her part, Simmons encourages others at the company — especially her younger colleagues — to give back through board service as a way to further develop their own leadership skills. But most of all, Simmons says, “I love seeing the impact I’m making on young people and their families. It just makes me want to do even more.”