Everybody needs good neighbours

Located in the city centre, Deloitte's Dublin office is in the heart of the business district. And yet right beside us are the people and communities that call this part of the city home. With our goal of not just making an impact on our people and our clients, but on the societies in which we operate too, we wanted to support our neighbouring communities on the issues that matter most to them. A number of key initiatives demonstrate our commitment to doing just that, with education at their heart. We have partnered with the following charities and schools to support our work in this area: Age Action, CBS James Street Secondary School, Junior Achievement, Solas Project and Suas.

Partnerships

Our partnership with CBS James Street Secondary School provides scholarships to enable students to progress on to third level education. To complement this, we also host annual mock interviews and career talks to the students as well as providing Transition Year work experience placements. Our collaboration with Solas Project allows us to take part in schools, business and university programmes enabling us to support even more students and schools in the Dublin 8 area, in addition to its Compass Prison Programme. Our longstanding partnership with Junior Achievement Ireland, and its schools programme, has helped us support a further nine schools in Dublin 8 since the beginning of our partnership in 1996. It is to people of all age profiles that we try to be good neighbours too. Through our collaboration with Age Action, we facilitate computer literacy classes for the elderly in our offices once a week, every week. In FY19, we completed our seventeenth block of six-week classes in a row.

Our work in Dublin 8 matters to us, as an organisation, but also to our people as individuals. Our goal is to help break down perceived barriers, whatever they may be, for the people we work with through these initiatives, while also providing our people with the meaningful volunteering experience they want.

Through our collaboration with Age Action, we work to address the digital divide by supporting over 160 elderly people to date to increase their IT skills by empowering them to use these new skills to remain independent in a digital world. The computer literacy programme is growing year-on-year with 60 of these learners being part of the programmes in our most recent financial year; FY19.

In collaboration with Junior Achievement Ireland, we've engaged with over 700 students in Dublin 8 since 2010 as well as 30 students in CBS James Street secondary school. These students have received support through CV workshops, mock interviews, work experience opportunities and in addition scholarships to progress to third level education without which they wouldn't be able to afford. A further 287 young people received support and mentoring from our volunteers in FY19 through the business, sport and prison programmes provided in collaboration with Solas Project.

We're really proud of these numbers. But sometimes it is one moment that can be the most powerful. This year, the first student from CBS James Street in Dublin 8 will join Deloitte, in our Consulting department.

We've delivered that opportunity. And that is why it is so important for us to be good neighbours.