I was recently invited to attend a forum hosted by Dell and The Atlantic – a magazine covering a wide array of subjects, including business, culture and technology. The event, Cracking the Code: The Next Generation of Women in STEM, invited an audience, ranging from chief technology officers to storybook authors, to discuss one of the most pressing issues of our time: How do we engage the next generation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Much of the dialogue encompassing the event connected me to many thoughts on the ways we can engage young girls in STEM.
As a part of ongoing efforts to invest in a more diverse technology workforce, Dell Inc. expects to contribute $14 million in grants and technology donations to support future generations of STEM workers, in current fiscal year which ends Feb. 3, 2018. Current donations made across Dell’s 71 youth learning partners globally are expected to bring technology education to more than 1.5 million underserved youth. With the expected contributions, a total of 4 million children will be impacted through Dell’s strategic giving programs, since 2014.
George Bandy, Mohawk’s vice president of sustainability, was the first-ever winner of the GreenStep People Award, and said he was humbled and honored to be recognized. “I think this particular kind of awards ceremony gives us the opportunity to celebrate all of our successes and pushes us to move forward around all these areas like health and wellness, social sustainability and financial acuity,” he said. “As we do that, we get to collaborate, and move forward as an industry for Mother Nature.”
SC Johnson today announced that the funds raised from its 2017 acre-for-acre match challenge will be used to kick off the world’s largest tropical reforestation project in the Brazilian Amazon. Through a partnership with Conservation International (CI) earlier this year to support the virtual reality film Under the Canopy, SC Johnson enlisted the public to help protect 10,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest through its acre-for-acre match campaign.
Investing in the wellbeing of our host communities is part of our mission as a sustainable and responsible mining company. In Ghana, we recently partnered with the Children’s Heart Foundation (CHF) to help save the life of Daniel Darkwa, a three-year-old boy suffering from atrial septal defect and patent ductus arteriosus, a rare condition that creates “holes” in the wall separating the top two chambers of the heart.