We give back to the communities in which we live and work and have continued to deepen our partnerships with local organizations. Through community service and volunteering opportunities, we work with nonprofit organizations to reduce inequalities and provide greater access to resources in our communities. This includes local food banks, relief agencies, at-risk youth programs, and educational institutions. In 2022, we invested in a digital platform that tracks all of our community service, volunteering, and donations to give us greater insights and analytics into our volunteer efforts and gift matching programs to better understand our reach and impact on our communities.
As a Huron community, we use our resources and expertise to make a positive impact in our communities. Our Huron Helping Hands (HHH) program serves as the foundation for our giving efforts and helps us align our actions with our priority United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through community service and volunteering, matching gifts, and charitable contributions, our teams supported more than 1,100 unique charitable organizations in 2022.
This year also marked the return of our annual Day of Service event, where employees celebrated Huron’s 20th anniversary by volunteering in the community. More than 1,600 Huron employees partnered with organizations around the globe to participate in 117 service events in 60 different locations. Together we:
Prepared and served more than 3,700 warm meals to the homeless and to families of hospitalized children
Wrote more than 600 letters and cards for children in hospitals, homeless women, and LGBTQ+ senior programs
Sorted and packed 256,775 pounds of food, equating to more than 213,400 meals for those in need
Weeded, landscaped, cleaned, and maintained 20 different parks, gardens, and farms across the globe
Sorted, inventoried, and restored nearly 6,000 donated goods to be distributed to local communities
Assembled more than 1,600 care kits and comfort items for various social service organizations
Supported more than 400 animals by assisting at local animal shelters
Cleaned, painted, and rehabbed 15 homes, schools, shelters, and community buildings
Tutored, coached, and mentored more than 850 youth
Our HHH program allows us to support a variety of charitable organizations that align with our values and mission. One of these organizations is Movember, whose goal is to change the face of men's health by investing in mental health and suicide prevention and the treatment of prostate and testicular cancers. Each year, we come together to support Movember by hosting events and raising funds. In November 2022, more than 200 employees were involved in Huron’s Movember team and raised over $20,000 by participating in a virtual Movember 5K, selling apparel with proceeds going directly to Movember, and sharing mental health resources with our employees and their families. Since 2015, Huron and its employees have raised over $150,000 for Movember.
Another organization we are proud to support is St. Jude Children's Research Hospital®, whose mission is to advance cures and the means of prevention for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. At Huron, we have a strong commitment to the health and well-being of future generations, and we are honored to collaborate with St. Jude in its efforts to provide treatment to children and families in need. In September 2022, we joined St. Jude again for our third fundraiser in honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, raising over $104,000 to help families impacted by childhood cancer. Over the last three years, Huron and its employees have raised over $290,000 in support of St. Jude.
We are also a proud supporter of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago Foundation and Ronald McDonald House Charities through both charitable sponsorships and employee participation.
We are passionate about supporting opportunities to close the gender gap in STEM and supporting women to achieve their full potential. As part of our commitment to both good health and well-being and gender equity, Huron supports the American Cancer Society ResearcHERS campaign, which funds women-led cancer research projects and helps sustain women in STEM careers.
Huron has also been a supporter of the American Heart Association’s STEM Goes Red event in Chicago for seven years in a row. In 2022, the event, which hosts more than 100 high school students from the Chicagoland area,
returned to an in-person format after two years of virtual offerings. Huron employees served as mentors, talked about heart health, and hosted a workshop to help participants learn how to use data and technology to serve their community.
In a project with a global chemical company to develop their future-oriented growth strategy, Innosight, Huron’s strategy and innovation business, helped the company to identify and develop sustainably focused opportunity areas that included environmentally friendly infrastructure materials and more sustainable packaging solutions.
We work with many mission-driven organizations and are committed to supporting our clients in industries that have a significant impact on the health and well-being of our communities. Our work in the healthcare industry enables us to help organizations that are seeking to address systemic biases and improve the overall health of underserved populations. Huron continues to work with a global healthcare organization to advance health equity by addressing social determinants of health. We are using a data-driven approach, aligning new care models with the needs of the community, and collaborating with healthcare stakeholders. This work is helping build a strong foundation for the future and improve clinical and social outcomes for patients around the world.
We also continue to expand our digital capabilities in healthcare to help our clients deliver better patient outcomes and help them advance their missions. Our Huron Intelligence® platform is bringing data sources together and using predictive modeling to uncover patterns of care to lower costs and improve the patient experience.
One way we are supporting our healthcare clients is through our What’s Right in Health Care® annual national conference, which is geared toward helping healthcare professionals connect, learn, and rejuvenate. This year's event showcased what’s right in healthcare through peer-led breakout sessions highlighting tactics used to achieve outstanding results and awe-inspiring keynotes from within and outside of the healthcare industry. Attendees took away insights, best practices, leadership skills, and information to make clinical and operational improvements in their healthcare organizations.
As part of our commitment to education and equal access to quality education, we continue to support organizations such as Tutoring Chicago and Reach Out and Read/Reach Out and Read of Greater New York through volunteer tutoring, book drives, and educational events. We have also hosted events such as our What's Right in Education event. For over a decade, leaders from some of the top-performing school districts around the country have come to What’s Right in Education to showcase the strategies that have helped them solve their greatest challenges. This year saw over 300 education leaders gather to advance their learnings as leaders and share perspective on what matters most to make a positive impact on students.
We have expanded our digital capabilities in the education industry to help our clients engage and attract students in a highly competitive environment and to deliver better student outcomes. For example, our education team is using technology to innovate enrollment and financial aid strategies that improve the student experience.
Collaborating with my Huron colleagues to provide an impactful contribution through Reach Out and Read New York (RORGNY) has been a uniquely rewarding experience. I'm excited to continue to work with Reach Out and Read in support of their mission to develop essential early literacy skills via the existing health infrastructure."
We are passionate about the transformative power of education and its ability to drive economic and community growth. That's why at Huron, we have created the social alliance initiative as part of our Huron Helping Hands program. The goal of this program is to help colleges and universities improve student success, particularly for low-income students, by enhancing institutional performance and sharing best practices across the higher education sector.
The program focuses on establishing project-based consulting with colleges and universities that meet select criteria.
As part of this program, Huron collaborated with Middlesex Community College, which serves a diverse student population, with more than 40% of its students being Pell-eligible. Similar to many other institutions navigating through the impacts of COVID, the College was facing several challenges, including decreased state funding and enrollment declines. Middlesex leadership collaborated with Huron to explore how to structure information technology (IT) as efficiently as possible, while also having technology play a key role in furthering the institution’s mission. Given Middlesex’s Pell-eligible student population and its mission of equity and transforming lives, Huron was able to partner with the College through our Social Alliance program in performing a broad-based IT assessment. In delivering Social Alliance projects, Huron commits to supporting resource-constrained institutions at reduced rates and provides expert teams of consulting professionals to lead critical projects aimed at furthering the organizational mission. Huron’s IT assessment and strategic planning work at Middlesex Community College enabled the Chief Information Officer to develop a new IT Strategic Plan and to focus on building an improved IT operating model as well as more effective IT governance. These initiatives will support IT in better partnering with campus divisions and aligning IT strategy with the College’s academic, student service, workforce development, and business interests.
We have also worked closely with Bloomfield College, a predominantly Black, Hispanic-serving, and minority-serving institution in New Jersey, and provided analytical support and professional insights to help the college find a solution to its growing financial challenges. Bloomfield has a long history of serving underserved populations and a student body with a high percentage Pell Grant-eligibility. The college's strong commitment to increasing access and affordability made it a perfect fit for our social alliance program.
Together, Bloomfield and Huron worked toward a shared goal of paving a path forward and upholding Bloomfield's mission of educating and empowering students. We remained committed to supporting Bloomfield in its efforts to serve the diverse populations of New Jersey and provide affordable education to first-generation, full-time students. In 2022, with Huron's support, Bloomfield formalized merger plans with Montclair State University to create an integrated structure that maintains Bloomfield's mission and expands Montclair's presence in the region.