Deloitte yesterday stepped up Deloitte21, its global education and skills initiative focused on preparing underserved young people for success in the 21st-century economy, by announcing two new initiatives: the Deloitte21 Fellows, and the Deloitte21 Competition.
Deloitte21 aims to support new and existing initiatives that develop the skills young people need - leadership, ethics, problem solving, and global awareness - to meet this century's most pressing challenges. By 2014, Deloitte21 aims to contribute $100 million worth of financial, volunteering, and pro bono support to 50 innovative community programs, providing new opportunities for underserved young people.
Leading the implementation of these initiatives on the ground will be the Deloitte21 Fellows, a worldwide network of high-performing Deloitte professionals who will drive volunteerism within their member firms to advance Deloitte21's impact. The projects supported include encouraging participation in China's national and regional community programmes; providing work readiness and job skills training to immigrant youth in Finland; helping College Summit, a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the college enrollment rate of low-income students across the U.S., strengthen its financial management capabilities; and offering business skills and education to young women seeking to create self-sustaining businesses in African countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Namibia through the MicroLoan Foundation.
The Deloitte21 Competition will encourage Deloitte member firms to identify local programs whose impact and scale will be significantly enhanced with additional financial support. Deloitte member firms will nominate programmes with which they are working hand-in-hand, and four such promising programs will be selected to receive funding - one of US$150,000 and three of US$50,000 each.
Deloitte has a longstanding commitment to education and skills-building. In the United Kingdom, the Deloitte Employability Initiative has grown from training 35 students in 2001-2002 to 6,000 students in 2009-2010, and, with a train-the-teacher model, aims to support 10,000 students in 2012-2013. Another example is eLearning for Kids, founded by a DTT director from the Netherlands in 2005, which provides free online and CD-ROM-based educational software used by more than 6 million children in 190 countries.