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2022 Progress Report: Helping Our Communities
Each year, we track several indicators that show progress toward achieving our community-service and philanthropy goals.
Company-paid community service hours metric tracks the on-the-clock hours our employees spent in community service activities, including hours for local volunteerism through our Volunteer Days benefit and half the hours they spend participating in the ACE Mentor Program. The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 saw reduced hours due to limited opportunities for in-person service. However, we’re committed to increasing employee service hours by 10% each year, and in 2022 we met this target, with a 47% increase.
Our Volunteer Days benefit allows employees to receive compensation for up to two days per year for community service activities. This metric tracks the hours logged under the “volunteer day” code on employees’ time sheets. It does not account for volunteerism by employees on their personal time. This number dropped during the pandemic, but we’ve more than doubled the number of hours logged in 2022 compared to 2021. We hope to increase the number of employee volunteer hours by linking U.S. holidays like Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth to days of service.
We track company-paid ACE Mentor Program participation, which is the amount of time U.S. employees spend as mentors or board members with the ACE Mentor Program of America. ACE volunteers are paid for 50% of their participation hours – an average of 15 per year – with the remainder a donation of their personal time. The development of remote programming during the pandemic enabled employees to continue to serve as mentors virtually. The program is back in person, and our number of volunteer hours continues to grow.
Charitable contributions include all payments in each year coded as “donations” in our accounting system. This includes annual contributions – such as those to the Thornton Tomasetti Foundation – and donations by our offices to local charities. It doesn’t account for contributions like pro bono work for nonprofits, lecturing at universities and colleges, or labor hours spent performing community service. Spending fell during the pandemic, but the overall trend is toward increased philanthropy.