The Power of Aligning Employee Engagement With a Critical Community Need

Every day, New York Life’s field force is tasked with helping individuals and families secure their financial futures and prepare for the unexpected. We are there during some of our clients’ most painful times and we see firsthand how grief impacts families. This deep connection to people in communities across the country has driven our philanthropic focus on childhood bereavement. Through the course of this work, we began to see an urgent need for more grief support at school.

In response to this growing trend, we developed the Grief-Sensitive Schools Initiative (GSSI), which trains our workforce to deliver much-needed resources to K-12 school communities so they can better support the millions of grieving students in America’s classrooms. To date, the program has reached more than 25,000 school community members in 46 states and over 1,000 schools have received grief training and resources. We aim to triple our impact by the end of 2020. 

As we build the program, we are learning important lessons about how to best engage our workforce while making meaningful change in our communities. Companies have an opportunity to amplify their efforts by first leveraging insights from current programs to determine gaps to be addressed by future initiatives, engaging diverse, credible stakeholders and content-area experts,  and amplifying an existing community presence to forge even deeper ties.  

Read the full blog post on CECP's Insights Blog: https://cecp.me/2A8fkDe