Achieving Greater Together: Northern Trust’s Global Impact

Northern Trust provides corporate donations and grants, employee volunteer grants, paid volunteer time off, disaster relief, volunteering (including in-person, virtual, and micro volunteering). The company had 69.1% year-on-year growth in total volunteer hours in 2023 and featured in the 2024 CSR Industry Report. We interviewed Audri Coffer, Second Vice President, Corporate Philanthropy Program Officer, to learn how Northern Trust achieved such success in engaging their global workforce.

How does philanthropy and social impact tie into the culture at Northern Trust?

Our company has a long history and tradition of giving back to our communities that began with our founder Byron L. Smith.​ In 1893, Mr. Smith seeded a relief fund for victims of a devastating fire that broke out during the construction of the World’s Fair. ​Under Mr. Smith’s leadership, Northern Trust’s charitable footprint grew and helped establish Chicago civic and cultural pillars such as: ​The Art Institute of Chicago​, The Field Museum​, United Way of Metro Chicago; and ​many more. Northern Trust and its employees have continued our tradition of giving. Over the past 10 years, Northern Trust has donated more than $170 million to charitable causes worldwide; and Northern Trust employees have volunteered more than 1 million hours.

Can you share a bit about Northern Trust’s corporate giving strategy and how you incentivize employees to donate to important causes?

Globally, Northern Trust is committed to supporting those who have been marginalized with more opportunities to achieve long-term financial success. To create these opportunities, Northern Trust concentrates its giving in four critical areas of basic needs: food, housing, healthcare, and education. Studies show that when essential human needs are met, benchmarks of long-term financial success—career opportunities, savings and home ownership—rise substantially, and paths to improved opportunity become more accessible.

Community engagement is an important part of Northern Trust’s culture. Our employees care about their local communities and understand they have a role to play in making them stronger for everyone. Giving back to the communities where we live and work is a priority for Northern Trust and as such employees can give of their time to any organization in a way that is meaningful to them. We have a diverse workforce around the world and while our giving strategy is focused, employees are empowered to meet the unique needs of their local communities. Through our Donations for Doers program our employees are able to earn quarterly grants through their volunteerism. We have an employee choice model – employees are able to give their grant to any eligible nonprofit organization, it doesn’t have to be who they volunteered with, so that they are able to support the organizations that are most significant to them.

Global Month of Service Highlights

Could you speak about your Global Month of Service and why it is such a successful initiative for volunteering engagement?

Giving back is in our DNA at Northern Trust and to boost our giving even further, in 2019, we formally launched Achieving Greater Together.​ Achieving Greater Together is a global volunteer initiative that allows all of our employees to engage in a unified volunteering effort during the month of October.​ In October 2023, Northern Trust employees performed nearly 53,000 hours of service for a total of more than 1,700 organizations, showing our deep commitment to giving back to the communities in which we live and work. Northern Trust employees are encouraged to use their time and talent to support charitable organizations year-round, but in October the company provides a wide variety of planned events for teams to work together, while also allowing employees to do charitable work of their own choosing.

Employees from Northern Trust locations around the world participated in events like painting a shelter in India, beach clean-ups in Australia, caring for shelter dogs throughout the U.S. and delivering food to the elderly in the U.K as well as virtual and micro volunteer events such as making cards for sick kids, writing letters to the elderly, and more. During our month of service, we pledge to donate 50 meals to those in need for every 1 hour our employee’s volunteer. Thanks to the generosity of our employees, in 2023 Northern Trust contributed more than 2.6 million meals to The Global Food Banking Network, European Food Banks Federation and Feeding America.

Volunteer events were a mix of virtual and in-person as well as skills-based activities where our employees can utilize their skills (such as mentoring, resume preparation, interview skills, financial literacy, etc.) or hands on activities where our employees can roll up their sleeves (such as packing/distributing food, painting, beach clean-ups, sorting and organizing clothing or inventory, etc.).

How have local CSR ambassadors and champions helped drive engagement for your global workforce? What other strategies are important to coordinate such an international effort?

We activate our employees to participate on a planning committee for our month of service. The global committee of 160 employees meets weekly for 5 months to plan. We provide training and resources focusing on how to use our YourCause site, coordinate volunteer events, present at town halls and to leadership, and more, so that our employees can amplify our month of service throughout the enterprise. Additionally, we have built out a robust dashboard in our engagement element that tracks metrics so that employees can see the campaign results in real time (hours and volunteers by region, country, business unit and more).