In five years, Thornton Tomasetti Gives Back has funded 4,140 hours (about 517 days) of “employees’ choice” community service and 5,116 hours (about 640 days) for coaching high school students through the ACE Mentor Program. Our community-service initiative nurtures our people’s passion for volunteerism, encourages personal growth and promotes collaboration and lasting relationships. According to the Society of Human Resource Management, which offers the longest-running annual survey of employee benefits in the U.S., only 28% of U.S. firms offer paid time off to employees who volunteer.
Our three-pronged “giving back” program includes our Volunteer Days benefit, which allows 16 paid hours per year for each employee to engage in community service. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of Volunteer Days hours used by employees grew by 55%, with 217 people volunteering in 19 locations. In 2023, employees participated in a wide range of charitable activities, often through group events in their offices. Among their many volunteer pursuits, some served as STEM ambassadors in London schools, while others organized an engineering-careers Day of Discovery for schoolgirls in New York City, planted trees in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, or participated as mentors in capstone projects at various universities. Also in 2023, our Chicago office became a founding contributor to the ADEPT program, pairing professional mentor-coaches with college students to advocate for aspiring Black and Brown engineers.
In September, our New York green champions and Mosaic, our multicultural employee network group, arranged a volunteer outing with GrowNYC, a nonprofit organization that distributes locally grown food to people whose access to produce is limited. Twenty-five volunteers rode the ferry to Governors Island, where they tended GrowNYC’s one-acre teaching garden and learned about the farm and how to identify plants. They then separated into groups to organize seeds and perform landscaping work. It was a golden opportunity for staff to experience nature, work with their hands, enjoy time with their colleagues and – most importantly – give back to the community. Funding for the event was provided by our annual corporate responsibility grants program.
Because so much of our legacy as a firm comes from nurturing the next generation of AEC professionals, we continue to support and volunteer with the ACE Mentor Program, created by Founding Principal Charles Thornton. We’ve seen a 43% increase in mentoring hours since 2022, with 127 employees mentoring high school students or serving as board members in 14 locations. Since 1994, our people have been volunteering to help achieve ACE’s mission to engage, excite and enlighten high school students, empowering them to pursue AEC careers.
In addition to the local community services we provide, through our partnership with Bridges to Prosperity, our employees travel to Rwanda each year to help construct pedestrian bridges serving isolated rural communities. In 2023, our team constructed an 80-meter trail bridge in the Nyamagabe District of southern Rwanda, serving more than 2,000 people and giving 840 children a safer way to get to school. Since we started this program, our employees have helped construct four bridges, enabling safe access to economic opportunity for more than 10,000 people.
“One way we aided the community was by helping build the bridge, but another way was by visiting the school and teaching the kids. We also donated school supplies, books and toys. The areas where Bridges to Prosperity works are remote, hard to get to and lack resources – these are things that sometimes we take for granted,” says Samantha Eng, a forensic engineer in our San Francisco office and 2023 Bridges to Prosperity team member.
“What stood out to me during the closing ceremony was listening to the community members talk about the impact of the bridge and hearing about the difficulties they faced before it was built and their hopes for a brighter future,” says Frank Fang, a structural engineer in our New York office and 2023 Bridges to Prosperity team member.
