Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been providing growth opportunities for Black students for decades. Every year, the HBCU Week Foundation hosts an HBCU Week College Fair, where colleges offer on-the-spot acceptances and scholarships.

The 2020 event came with unique challenges:

• HBCUs needed to identify, recruit, and enroll students as efficiently as possible—a task intensified by COVID-19 and ongoing socioeconomic disparities affecting Black communities.

• The Foundation needed to update its systems to connect students to HBCUs and manage scholar relationships and events.

• The Foundation needed help sustaining operations during COVID-19 and growing in the future.

With that in mind, our team began helping the Foundation build its capacity and scale sustainably. They streamlined the methods used to track scholar relationships, manage events, and enable real-time recruitment. Salesforce, a Deloitte alliance, created a data analytics platform to track student engagements with the Foundation and connect them with peers, HBCU alumni, and recruiters.

Thanks to these efforts, 6,226 people registered, with almost 5,000 attending the event and hundreds attending panel discussions. Moreover, the Foundation now has an amplified vision and strategic road map to grow operations and scale sustainably.

• Acceptances: 803
• Full scholarships: 44
• Partial scholarships: 226
• HBCU scholarship total: $7,292,150
• Foundation partners scholarship total: $280,000

Learn more

Leftover cooking oil from your favorite fast-food fries could eventually power your business flight. That's the idea behind sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and Deloitte’s agreements with American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines. As part of our commitment to reduce carbon emissions and address the climate crisis through WorldClimate, Deloitte entered into SAF agreements with these airlines to help reduce our business travel emissions.

The SAF certificate is a concept under development by the World Economic Forum’s Clean Skies for Tomorrow initiative. We can avoid some of our future business travel emissions through the use of sustainable aviation fuel, since SAF can reduce life cycle emissions from aviation fuel up to 80% compared to fossil jet fuel.

This will help us achieve our goals of net-zero emissions and reducing business travel emissions 50% per employee by 2030. Through our SAF collaborations to date, we have avoided the emissions from approximately 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (equivalent to approximately 16,000 passengers flying one way from NYC to LA).

As a new market solution, SAF is not available at the scale or price needed to be the main source of fuel for US airlines. Deloitte's SAF agreements will help create more market demand, with the goal of increasing availability and affordability, to help us meet our goals and to catalyze the nascent SAF market. Collaborations like this one are pivotal for the future of sustainable business travel—uniting a large organization seeking to reduce its carbon footprint with airlines that can help make it happen.

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Since the early days of COVID-19, frontline workers have faced significant challenges in securing personal protective equipment (PPE). Colonel Ted Scott saw an opportunity.

Colonel Scott is a senior manager on Deloitte LLP’s ServiceNow Business Architecture and Strategy team. He also has 34 years of military service and commands a training regiment of 800 soldiers in the Georgia Army National Guard. In early 2020, Ted and his regiment were activated as part of a COVID-19 response task force. He led coordination of hospital medical support, food bank meal preparation, nursing home disinfection, and mobile testing.

In the course of that work, Colonel Scott and his National Guard team realized the dire need for PPE across Georgia. Using 3D printers that produce artillery and tank system parts, they collaborated with Work Force Innovators of America and the NASCAR design team to develop a PPE design and manufacturing process for face mask and shield prototypes. They did it in three days.

Since then, this collaboration has produced hundreds of face masks and protective face shields, and Colonel Scott has received the Georgia State Humanitarian Service Award.

Colonel Scott reflects on how his experiences as both a teammate and a leader (at Deloitte and in the National Guard) have shaped his commitment to leadership and community service. "Throughout both my military service and civilian career at Deloitte, I've learned that collaboration is essential for creating and empowering strong teams that consistently deliver excellent results," he says. "Good leaders recognize the value of diverse skills and experiences and know how to bring these together for the greater good."

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been providing growth opportunities for Black students for decades. Every year, the HBCU Week Foundation hosts an HBCU Week College Fair, where colleges offer on-the-spot acceptances and scholarships.

The 2020 event came with unique challenges:

• HBCUs needed to identify, recruit, and enroll students as efficiently as possible—a task intensified by COVID-19 and ongoing socioeconomic disparities affecting Black communities.

• The Foundation needed to update its systems to connect students to HBCUs and manage scholar relationships and events.

• The Foundation needed help sustaining operations during COVID-19 and growing in the future.

With that in mind, our team began helping the Foundation build its capacity and scale sustainably. They streamlined the methods used to track scholar relationships, manage events, and enable real-time recruitment. Salesforce, a Deloitte alliance, created a data analytics platform to track student engagements with the Foundation and connect them with peers, HBCU alumni, and recruiters.

Thanks to these efforts, 6,226 people registered, with almost 5,000 attending the event and hundreds attending panel discussions. Moreover, the Foundation now has an amplified vision and strategic road map to grow operations and scale sustainably.

• Acceptances: 803
• Full scholarships: 44
• Partial scholarships: 226
• HBCU scholarship total: $7,292,150
• Foundation partners scholarship total: $280,000

Learn more

Benny is all ears and jumping in to serve. As part of Deloitte's commitment to military members and their families, the organization is excited to welcome the black lab puppy from America's VetDogs service dog program to its family. Deborah Golden, US Cyber & Strategic Risk leader, will be raising Benny for the next 12-14 months until he graduates and goes off to "In For Training," where he will learn advanced skills before getting partnered with his "forever person."

Service dogs offer their humans help with daily tasks, emotional support, and the potential for a better quality of life in the face of visual, hearing, and mobility impairments. These well-trained pups learn how to signal sounds, retrieve essential items, and even provide comfort and calm to companions who struggle with mental health challenges, such as PTSD or anxiety.

Veterans, active-duty service members, and first responders with disabilities can benefit from the emotional bond with their pup, as well as a sense of renewed independence and purpose that often comes from having a service dog by their side.

Deloitte's sponsored pup will ultimately support a veteran or first responder, who will receive Benny when he has proven he can perform as a highly skilled service dog. Incredibly, Deborah has raised six service puppies, two of them (Cedar and Todd) for the full duration of their training activities. Deborah and family (#TeamGolden) are grateful for the opportunity to help Benny meet his training milestones and excited for the day he joins the ranks of service dogs who bring joy and comfort to our brave service members and responders and who help them to live with dignity and independence.

Learn more

Since the early days of COVID-19, frontline workers have faced significant challenges in securing personal protective equipment (PPE). Colonel Ted Scott saw an opportunity.

Colonel Scott is a senior manager on Deloitte LLP’s ServiceNow Business Architecture and Strategy team. He also has 34 years of military service and commands a training regiment of 800 soldiers in the Georgia Army National Guard. In early 2020, Ted and his regiment were activated as part of a COVID-19 response task force. He led coordination of hospital medical support, food bank meal preparation, nursing home disinfection, and mobile testing.

In the course of that work, Colonel Scott and his National Guard team realized the dire need for PPE across Georgia. Using 3D printers that produce artillery and tank system parts, they collaborated with Work Force Innovators of America and the NASCAR design team to develop a PPE design and manufacturing process for face mask and shield prototypes. They did it in three days.

Since then, this collaboration has produced hundreds of face masks and protective face shields, and Colonel Scott has received the Georgia State Humanitarian Service Award.

Colonel Scott reflects on how his experiences as both a teammate and a leader (at Deloitte and in the National Guard) have shaped his commitment to leadership and community service. "Throughout both my military service and civilian career at Deloitte, I've learned that collaboration is essential for creating and empowering strong teams that consistently deliver excellent results," he says. "Good leaders recognize the value of diverse skills and experiences and know how to bring these together for the greater good."

Despite efforts to gain parity in the world of technology, women currently represent only 29 percent of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) jobs in the United States, according to research from Catalyst. And now—as many schools go virtual due to COVID–19—both teachers and parents are seeking new resources to engage and inspire young students, especially when it comes to STEM subjects.

Meet Ella the Engineer.

At the onset of the pandemic, Deloitte had already been working with the Ella Project, creator of Ella the Engineer. They then launched a new Deloitte-sponsored virtual reading series of "Ella the Engineer" comic books and free, interactive activity toolkits—all with the goal of exposing girls to STEM in a fun and inspiring way. Ella solves a variety of problems using her STEM know-how and along the way seeks the advice of a trio of Deloitte women leaders.

"I like the concept and the message of never giving up," said 10-year-old J. Hernández. "I like that Ella teaches girls around her own age (like me) what to do, how to work hard, and how to follow their dreams."

Coming together with the Ella Project is part of Deloitte's longstanding commitment to diversity, inclusion, and STEM education in order to create a future filled with lots of talented women and girls helping to move society forward using their STEM skills.

Learn more

As COVID-19 neared its peak in New York City—one of the nation’s hardest-hit areas—Deloitte Global and its network of member firms and American Airlines joined forces to meet the nation’s ongoing need for medical supplies. By donating unused credits for previously canceled flights, Deloitte Global and its network of member firms helped American Airlines transport more than 40,000 medical gowns from Shanghai to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

"We were grateful to collaborate with American to help transport life-saving medical supplies to the hospitals on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis," said Punit Renjen, Deloitte Global CEO.

Photos provided by American Airlines

Caseworkers serve on the front lines protecting America’s most vulnerable population—children. Ensuring the safety of a child while stabilizing their situation and promoting the child’s well-being is a daunting task. Many states’ legacy information technology systems are unable to accommodate new digital collaboration models or the pace of change required. HHS NextGen for Children Services, Deloitte's new cloud-based solution built on the Salesforce platform, addresses those challenges and provides a data-driven process to support case practice review, verification of practice outcomes, and compliance with federal program and reporting requirements.

The solution can help improve outcomes through digital engagement and collaboration capabilities and a 360-customer view that support modern casework practices and program administration. HHS NextGen is backed by Deloitte’s 20+ years of children services implementation experience and thousands of dedicated Salesforce practitioners.

Because HHS NextGen is built on the class-leading Salesforce platform, all the modern benefits of cloud technology—configurability, maintainability, and scalability—are out of the box. HHS NextGen adds to Salesforce a production proven solution made specifically for child welfare and childcare agencies that is ready to accelerate digital transformation.

Learn more about Deloitte's Ecosystems & Alliances

Deloitte and ServiceNow work together to help organizations enhance business outcomes with an end-to-end digital workflow platform for a variety of industries. It’s not just implementing the solution to automate your current processes—it’s reimagining how work gets done, enabling material improvements in revenue and cost reduction while helping to improve the employee and customer experience.

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Deloitte and ServiceNow came together to create a business solution for incident response: DeloitteRESOLVE for COVID-19 Response. This technology can be used to help organizations monitor staff exposure, build a risk profile, and create an internal information forum as a component of their COVID-19 response plan.

Where permitted, functionality might include tracking travel and public exposure, personal health monitoring, and mapping interactions with infected persons. The DeloitteRESOLVE solution can also supply critical information to staff, such as policies, procedures, and relevant news to help people respond to related concerns.

In an effort to help those in need and help respond to COVID-19, DeloitteRESOLVE is being offered at no cost until September 30, 2020.

Learn more about DeloitteRESOLVE and Deloitte's Ecosystems & Alliances

For young people, a job provides more than a paycheck; it also provides a sense of self-worth and community involvement. But finding a job amid the economic fallout of COVID-19 can be challenging, especially in lower-income communities where there may be fewer opportunities, according to the Pew Research Center. Juma Ventures, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young people in need build job skills, couldn’t let this difficult economic reality get in its way.

Before the pandemic, Juma focused on connecting young candidates with jobs at sports and entertainment arenas typically located in lower-income areas.

With many of those venues closed due to COVID-19, Juma engaged Deloitte to help rework its business model and success metrics. To better match companies with potential employees, we helped Juma develop new ways to assess opportunities and gauge an applicant’s fit, as well as new outreach materials highlighting the value Juma brings to employers. By helping Juma Ventures adapt to today’s challenges, we’re continuing our shared mission to help the next generation succeed, advance, and thrive in their careers.

As cities around the world navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments look for innovative ways to deliver essential services rapidly to their agencies, employees, and citizens.

In spring 2020, the City of San Diego was evaluating options for helping citizens respond to the pandemic. Since Deloitte was already working with the City on its existing "Get it Done" app, we were able to quickly develop an Emergency Needs Portal that allowed organizations to crowdsource support for critical resource needs. San Diego's Emergency Donation Portal launched in early April 2020. Six weeks after its launch, the community had donated more than 340,000 critical items with a market value of more than $458,569.

Deloitte's knowledge of San Diego's operations helped us quickly determine there was a large pool of untapped community resources–from furloughed school bus drivers and hospitality workers to inventory in nonessential stores. Leveraging elements of Salesforce’s suite of cloud-based emergency response solutions accelerated development time.

Months later, daily donations continue to come in. Deloitte’s work with the City of San Diego demonstrates how local government agencies and private-sector organizations can come together to help support communities during difficult times.

Learn more

What will life be like after COVID-19? What will it take to thrive in a world remade? We’re all looking for answers to these fundamental questions. To help business leaders plan for an uncertain future, Deloitte and Salesforce hosted a dialogue among some of the world's best-known scenario thinkers. We came together to consider the societal and business impact of the current crisis—because remarkable times call for remarkable collaboration.

Deloitte and Salesforce explored factors likely to have a significant impact post-COVID-19. Four potential scenarios emerged for how events might unfold: The passing storm, good company, sunrise in the east,

and lone wolves. Each scenario paints a picture of what the next three to five years might bring and how businesses and society could develop.

Teams from Deloitte and Salesforce have worked side-by-side for years to help clients solve some of their most pressing business challenges. Now, in a time where leaders must take decisive action to ensure their organizations’ success, our collaboration is more important than ever.

Learn more about the four scenarios and all Deloitte Ecosystems & Alliances

Leftover cooking oil from your favorite fast-food fries could eventually power your business flight. That's the idea behind sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and Deloitte’s agreements with American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines. As part of our commitment to reduce carbon emissions and address the climate crisis through WorldClimate, Deloitte entered into SAF agreements with these airlines to help reduce our business travel emissions.

The SAF certificate is a concept under development by the World Economic Forum’s Clean Skies for Tomorrow initiative. We can avoid some of our future business travel emissions through the use of sustainable aviation fuel, since SAF can reduce life cycle emissions from aviation fuel up to 80% compared to fossil jet fuel.

This will help us achieve our goals of net-zero emissions and reducing business travel emissions 50% per employee by 2030. Through our SAF collaborations to date, we have avoided the emissions from approximately 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (equivalent to approximately 16,000 passengers flying one way from NYC to LA).

As a new market solution, SAF is not available at the scale or price needed to be the main source of fuel for US airlines. Deloitte's SAF agreements will help create more market demand, with the goal of increasing availability and affordability, to help us meet our goals and to catalyze the nascent SAF market. Collaborations like this one are pivotal for the future of sustainable business travel—uniting a large organization seeking to reduce its carbon footprint with airlines that can help make it happen.

Learn more

Social distancing mandates due to COVID-19 continue to challenge institutions that rely on face-to-face interaction, like museums. But some of these institutions are bucking that trend. The Franklin Institute (TFI) of Philadelphia, one of the nation’s oldest and most revered science museums, has now reopened–both physically and virtually–with new tools and capabilities.

A pro bono team from Deloitte Consulting LLP came together with the executive corporate board of TFI to rethink the museum’s operations and create a more resilient business strategy. That effort would result in the creation of a financial management dashboard helping to streamline reporting and provide TFI’s management with monthly operations data, such as total sales, number of tickets sold by age tier, and volunteer hours.

On July 8, 2020, TFI reopened with strict public health measures in place, ready to redouble its efforts to spark an interest in STEM education by connecting with underserved communities, in person, and online through such programs as "Be a chemist at home."

There's now the opportunity to share the management dashboard with other nonprofit institutions. That may also provide an opportunity to many of TFI's sister institutions to better navigate the near-term uncertainties of museum management in the face of COVID–19.

As part of our continued response to COVID-19, Deloitte is donating $90,000 in credits for previously canceled flights on American Airlines to Team Rubicon, a veteran-led disaster relief organization leading efforts in the battle against the pandemic.
Team Rubicon not only continues to respond to disasters and humanitarian crises, but has also expanded its capabilities to include on-site medical support, running mobile testing operations, food delivery to at-risk communities, and opportunities for volunteers to help their neighbors through individual acts of service. Team Rubicon has launched more than 300 operations in 44 states in response to COVID-19 and these donated miles will help move their volunteers around the country to continue to support COVID-19-related operations.

Deloitte's COVID-19 response focuses on making an impact every day through direct donations to organizations fighting the pandemic, collaborating with clients and suppliers on innovative medical solutions, supporting nonprofits and communities in need, rolling out or expanding employee giving programs, and supporting government response efforts.

Learn more about the effort

Photo credit - Photo courtesy of Team Rubicon/shot by Kirk Jackson

In response to the spread of coronavirus around the world, Deloitte has developed an accelerator in conjunction with the Salesforce Health Cloud platform. The accelerator is designed to enable health care organizations to digitally triage, monitor, and remotely manage treatment of coronavirus patients and quarantined persons.

ConvergeHEALTH Connect for Crisis Response accelerator is the latest module in the ConvergeHEALTH Connect suite that harnesses Deloitte's vast experience in the health care industry and is built on the Salesforce Health Cloud platform.

National health authorities, health systems, and other organizations are taking steps to prevent the spread of coronavirus and are working to prepare for scenarios that include an overwhelmed health care system. To help address this pandemic, ConvergeHEALTH Connect for Crisis Response accelerates the deployment of capabilities on Salesforce Health Cloud for health care systems, medical teams, and patients. These capabilities include an innovative triage tool, a central administrative infrastructure for managing remote treatment, execution of medical care plans, and digital tools to empower patients during treatment.

Learn more

To support the life sciences industry in its search for a COVID-19 vaccine, Deloitte has waived all licensing fees for organizations using MyPath for Clinical for COVID-19 related clinical trials. We’re also waiving fees for other clinical trials affected by COVID-19.

"MyPath for Clinical is designed to help life sciences companies align with US and international regulatory bodies that have encouraged the adoption of remote data capture and 'siteless' trial capabilities to overcome these challenges and expedite needed solutions during the pandemic. Through this offer, we’re hoping our clients and other qualifying organizations will be able to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on their trials and move efficiently through the clinical trial process," said Ryan Hoffmeister, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and chief operations officer, ConvergeHEALTH by Deloitte.

COVID-19 has affected the industry’s ability to conduct trials. Life sciences companies are faced with broad travel restrictions, concerns about investigative site capacity, and patient safety. Deloitte is committed to helping our clients, and our society, respond to this unprecedented situation.

Learn more

To enable an effective and successful reentry, leaders can first create a centralized group to oversee the situation and execute plans. Next, it’s important to define critical business services and use a decision matrix to determine which jobs and roles would need to be located in workplaces versus those that could be done remotely. After all, reentry is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

Many employees understand why they may need to return to the office, but it is important that they feel ready, willing, and able to come in. Some large banks and investment management firms have rolled out employee experience surveys to gauge comfort levels. Other firms are considering implementing “opt-in” programs for workers who wish to return.

In light of growing safety concerns, one insurance company is redesigning its agile work environments within office buildings. An investment management firm that had adopted a more open workplace environment to encourage collaboration and creativity will now reconsider how the space can be adapted.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to reentering workplaces. Each company will have to make decisions based on its strategy, resources, and focus area. Leaders should strive to find a balance between revenue and cost while remaining committed to their organizations’ purpose and ensuring that employee and customer well-being remain top priorities.

Learn more

Most organizations’ first priority has been crisis response and emphasizing health, safety, essential services, and the virtualization of work and education. As organizations begin to emerge from this response phase, leaders are focused on the next set of workforce challenges as they plan for the recovery.

Three phases that all resilient leaders will likely face amid the COVID-19 outbreak:
- Respond: How an organization deals with the present situation and manages continuity
- Recover: How an organization learns and emerges stronger
- Thrive: How an organization prepares for and shapes for the "new normal"

The recovery process adopted by each organization will serve as a bridge between the response and what its future will look like. The biggest challenge organizations will likely face in recovery is the tension between preparing for a return to work while also embracing a new reality: rethinking work.

Business leaders should begin the recovery process with a sense of priorities and direction for the future. We believe, as detailed in Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends,,those should start with organizational purpose, potential, and perspective.

These guideposts, along with the five critical actions—reflect, recommit, reengage, rethink, and reboot—will help organizations navigate these workforce-related strategies in the shift from response to recovery.

Download the workforce strategies report and workbook

As COVID-19 began rapidly changing businesses and the economic environment, the United States government passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). Providing $2.2 trillion of economy-wide financial stimulus in the form of financial aid to individuals, businesses, nonprofit entities, states, and municipalities, the CARES Act is extremely complex. Many organizations trying to implement the act and take advantage of the support offered needed help connecting the dots.

From the outset, Deloitte professionals collaborated to provide clients with new insights on accounting and reporting issues. Several of the CARES Act’s provisions and programs assisting small and large businesses include billions of dollars in loan and grant allocations, regulatory relief for certain industries, and income tax relief. All of this means that implementation action is required by multiple agencies—the Small Business Administration, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board—making it the perfect time for Deloitte professionals to band together and holistically support clients in their times of need.

As more guidance has come out and provisions have changed, Deloitte professionals have stayed agile and responsive, continuing to give their clients the most up-to-date information available.

Read more about Deloitte’s CARES Act analysis

Recent events related to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice have challenged us in new ways, causing unequally shared human suffering, abnormal pressures on health and other critical systems, serious economic damage, and deep peril for many sectors and businesses.

As our organization, like so many others, addresses these new challenges, collaboration and integration have never been more important. The "tyranny of the urgent" has seldom felt more acute; and the importance of tempering this with sharp-eyed focus on our longer-term goals seldom more profound. The past couple of months have also reinforced a related shift that some organizations have been making—extending the conception of strategy beyond making choices to more fully focusing also on continuous generation of new (and sometimes provocative) options for inclusion in our consideration set.

Most importantly, the responses to the pandemic from businesses have powerfully confirmed three of our beliefs that sit at the heart of this perspective:

- Most business leaders care passionately—about our people, customers, communities, and broader society.
- Individually and collectively, business leaders have extraordinary agency and a deep willingness to play a central role in forging positive societal change.
- This broader role has been growing in importance and urgency, and it is now imperative that many business leaders embrace it more fully as a central part of rebooting their own businesses.

Read more and download the paper