Comcast Employees Help Communities Thrive with $100 Million in Support to United Way

From funding day care so that young, ambitious parents can learn job skills and finish school, to helping veterans and their families find housing, so many of our society’s most pressing issues relate to the basic needs of food, education, and housing. Increasingly, these needs cannot be addressed by the private, public, or nonprofit sectors alone, and that’s why Comcast NBCUniversal is committed, year after year, to partnering with United Way to help make a lasting impact in the communities we serve.

One of the ways Comcast NBCUniversal rallies around our communities is through our annual Employee Giving Campaign – and today we celebrate the incredible generosity of our employees whose contributions this year helped take us beyond $100 million in total historic support to United Way and the millions of individuals and families helped.

In the last several weeks, our employees collectively pledged nearly $8 million to improve communities nationwide. Combined with more than $2 million in matching grants from the Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation, our company this year is providing $10 million in support to dozens of United Way chapters across the country.

We first began partnering with United Way because, like Comcast, United Way has a national presence but also a very strong commitment to local communities which can more effectively address these basic issues and needs. As Comcast Founder Ralph Roberts once said to me, “The healthier and more vibrant the communities are where our employees and customers live and work, then the healthier and more vibrant our company is going to be.”

The important work of United Way makes a life-changing impact on so many individuals. They include Lavelle, a 26-year-old father from Chicago who received job training and mentoring, and the confidence to take care of his family; and Michaela, a young mother of three from Denver now on a path to a medical career after overcoming obstacles faced by so many youth who age out of foster care.

Lavelle and Michaela were among the people we introduced to our employees this year to help them see the impact of the donations they make. Meet them, as well as some of our employees who embody our dedication to giving back, in the video above.

United Way was created more than 130 years ago, in Denver, when a local philanthropist teamed up with the city’s religious leaders and found that by working together, they could embrace new ways to make their community a better place. 

Today, it remains imperative that we all join together, and that’s why Comcast NBCUniversal is proud to partner with United Way to continue to drive positive social change in our communities.

David L. Cohen is Senior Executive Vice President and the Chief Diversity Officer of Comcast Corporation.