2006-2007 Winners

Exelon
The Exelon-United Way Stay in School Initiative

Nearly half of Chicago's public school freshmen do not graduate from high school. Stay in School — a collaboration with the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago (UWMC) and three community agencies, BUILD, Inc., Centers for New Horizons and Youth Guidance — takes a holistic approach to Chicago's dropout issue. The goal is to ensure students in underserved communities have an equal chance to build the academic skills needed to achieve sustainable success. Since its inception, Stay in School has served roughly 5,000 students from Chicago's Austin, Bronzeville/Grand Boulevard and Humboldt Park neighborhoods, where dropout and truancy rates are among the city's highest.

This year, UWMC issued its first-ever Stay in School Report Card, measuring the program’s impact on keeping students on track for graduation and building support systems to instill a desire for academic achievement. The results point to the overwhelming success of the collaboration:

• 92% of Stay in School students were promoted to the next grade level and 85% graduated from high school or completed their GEDs;
• 75% had a school attendance rate of at least 90% for the academic year;
• 68% increased their pro-social behaviors; and
• 52% improved at least one grade in core courses.

Exelon is expanding the Stay in School concept beyond Chicago, partnering on similar projects with agencies in Rockford and Freeport, Illinois, and in Philadelphia and surrounding counties in Pennsylvania.

“The results we’ve achieved with the Stay in School Initiative speak to the power of collaborative partnerships and employee engagement,” said John Rowe, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Exelon. “This program ensures the academic success of young people and is increasing the talent pool for future leaders and our workforce.”

Exelon Corporation, headquartered in Chicago, is one of the nation’s largest electric utilities with more than $15 billion in annual revenues. It distributes electricity to approximately 5.2 million customers in Illinois and Pennsylvania, and gas to 480,000 customers in the Philadelphia area. Exelon operates the largest nuclear fleet in the United States, the third largest commercial nuclear fleet in the world, and is generating nuclear energy more efficiently than ever.

Northrop Grumman Corporation
Northrop Grumman Corporation: Defining the Future

Northrop Grumman Corporation has designed and implemented a program called Defining the Future, which brings together communities, industry and academia to address the declining interest in math and science by motivating students to pursue careers in those fields and ensure the future of the nation’s technical workforce. Multi-faceted and active at both national and local levels, the initiative reaches out to youth through curriculum, teacher and employee development; employee volunteerism; co-ops and internships; community and school support; and sponsorships, scholarships and partnerships with the community.

Defining the Future places a heavy emphasis on working with women and people of color, groups particularly under-represented in the math and science fields. The company has mentored over 10,000 students in its high school and middle school involvement partnership programs. It also provides teachers with tools and resources to inspire student interest in the math and science fields.

Over the past year, the company has sent 720 teachers on airplane flights that simulate weightlessness, allowing them to experience a microgravity, space-like environment as part of their Weightless Flights of Discovery program. Those teachers attend workshops to learn about the physics of weightlessness, and they design, in many cases with the assistance of their students, microgravity experiments to perform during their flights. They then use their videotaped flight experiences to excite their students about the importance of math and science. These activities have touched the lives of more than 20,000 students.

Northrop Grumman also partners with more than 48 organizations such as Sally Ride Science to focus on empowering young girls to excel in their technical literacy and build a foundation to pursue careers in science, math and engineering. The company also teams with PBS to sponsor Cyberchase—the only animated TV series dedicated to building an understanding of math as a useful, fun and an everyday tool.

Defining the Future is a great model that brings industry, academia and the community together to excite, mentor and develop young people, especially in the critical areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to increase the quantity and quality of the workforce needed to ensure our nation’s technical excellence and the vitality of our economy.

"The men and women of Northrop Grumman are proud to receive this distinguished award, which is named after a great American, the late Ron Brown,” said Dr. Ronald D. Sugar, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Northrop Grumman. “Our Defining the Future program underscores just what is possible when corporate America joins forces with the American people to solve problems common to all."

Northrop Grumman Corporation, headquartered in Los Angeles, is the world's #1 shipbuilder and the #3 defense contractor. It operates through eight segments: Electronic Systems, Information Technology, Integrated Systems, Ship Systems, Newport News, Mission Systems, Space Technology and Technical Services.

Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble: Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program

Clean drinking water: It is easy to take for granted, but more than 1 billion people around the world—one-sixth of humanity—do not have access to safe water. And drinking contaminated water can result in illness that can lead to death. In fact, it is estimated that 4,000 children die every day from diseases caused by drinking unsafe water.

P&G’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water program—the signature program of the Live, Learn and Thrive™ corporate cause—helps address the critical need for clean drinking water by use of PUR™ Purifier of Water. A simple, household-level water treatment technology, a four-gram sachet of powdered PUR treats 10 liters of water effectively killing bacteria and viruses and removing parasites and solid materials. Five clinical studies show that use of PUR can reduce diarrheal illness in children under the age of five by an average of 50 percent.

During the last four years, the Children’s Safe Drinking Water program has provided safe drinking water in over 30 countries. More than 860 million liters of safe drinking water have been provided which have helped avert more than 35 million days of diarrhea. At the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, P&G announced a new goal of providing two billion liters of safe drinking water by 2012.

Children’s Safe Drinking Water has provided PUR Purifier of Water sachets in nearly every major natural disaster in the last few years, including the Southeast Asia tsunami, hurricanes in the Caribbean, floods in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and earthquakes in Pakistan and Indonesia. Most recently, PUR has been provided to victims of flooding in Ethiopia, Kenya and the Dominican Republic.

Essential partners of the Children’s Safe Drinking Water program include USAID’s Global Development Alliance, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PSI, World Vision, CARE, UNICEF, Johns Hopkins University-Center for Communication Programs, Africare, Family Health International, Samaritan’s Purse, International Council of Nurses, International Federation of Red Cross, and many others.

“We appreciate this recognition of P&G's Children’s Safe Drinking Water program” said A. G. Lafley, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of The Procter & Gamble Company. “Our employees and many Children's Safe Drinking Water partners take this recognition as a challenge to serve even more people in need in the years to come...and we will.”

Three billion times a day, P&G brands touch the lives of people around the world. The company has one of the strongest portfolios of trusted, quality, leadership brands, including Pampers®, Tide®, Ariel®, Always®, Whisper®, Pantene®, Mach3®, Bounty®, Dawn®, Gain®, Pringles®, Folgers®, Charmin®, Downy®, Lenor®, Iams®, Crest®, Oral-B®, Actonel®, Duracell®, Olay®, Head & Shoulders®, Wella®, Gillette®, and Braun®. The P&G community consists of 138,000 employees working in over 80 countries worldwide.)