Youth Action

High school may be the most important fashion runway in a teenager’s life, but when you’re homeless or in foster care, owning a confidence-inspiring wardrobe is difficult.

We are incredibly committed to STEM education at Weatherford, especially when it comes to supporting women and underprivileged youth. In 2016, we provided approximately 2,220 students with STEM mentorship through our Weatherford Worldwide Initiative Supporting Education (WISE) program. In June, the Weatherford WISE program hosted seven high school girls from the Houston area for their IPAA/PESA summer externship.

The visit by the 14 students from the Elizabeth Conradie School in Kimberley, organised in collaboration with the Department of Education, was the idea of an employee of De Beers Sightholder Sales South Africa (DBSSA), Jabulani Cindi, himself disabled.

An increasing number of businesses are discovering that volunteerism is an important part of their corporate social responsibility program. It’s not only good for the local community and improves the corporate brand, but it’s a powerful tool for increasing engagement in the workplace.

On June 16, 8:30am, over 200 Amway and community volunteers descended upon the Steepletown neighborhood on Grand Rapids’ northwest side. Their goal? To bring something that had been missing from the area for quite some time – a playground.

Back in 2013, I joined the Alliance to End Hunger after a decade as a corporate lobbyist. As with any major life change, this one had implications on our family routines. One night over dinner, my husband and I talked about my new job with our children — then 8- and 6-years old. That evening at bedtime, my daughter, Sarah, said thoughtfully, “But Mommy, if you end hunger you won’t have a job anymore.” My response to her was “And wouldn’t that be wonderful.”

Keep America Beautiful, in collaboration with the East Side Partnership, lived up to its call-to-action to #cleanYOURblock by conducting a Great American Cleanup event on June 20 at a number of locations in Stamford, Connecticut, home of its national headquarters.

Today my school looks drastically different than it did at the beginning of the school year, and that is thanks to the more than 400 members of the Comcast NBCUniversal family, including dozens from their nonprofit partner City Year, who joined us on our campus in April for Comcast Cares Day. The volunteers made change happen by painting bright and colorful murals throughout the school that focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and college preparedness. The physical transformation of the school has inspired our students, where 80 percent of them are eligible for free or reduced lunch, to believe that each and every one can and will be ready for a college career when they graduate.

As a start, De Beers Consolidated Mines (DBCM) has donated football and netball equipment to 13 primary schools in the Blouberg area, close to its Venetia mine.

In the world of fighting hunger, innovation comes in many forms. It can come from a new use of technology—like our Stephen J. Brady Stop Hunger Scholar Jack Griffin, who developed an app that uses GPS to tell people in need where they can find a food bank. Other times, it can be using an old technology in a new way, such as using food trucks to create mobile kitchens that bring hot meals to people in need, a method employed by other Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation grant recipients.