Giving back and empowering our communities is part of the tradition and legacy of our Comcast core values. In New Mexico, Comcast has strong partnerships with United Way agencies across our state and each year we give our employees a chance to make a difference within their local communities. Since 2001, more than $100 million has been provided to local communities by Comcast NBCUniversal and our employees through our annual Employee Giving Campaign. In 2019 alone, Comcast invested over $92,000 in United Way agencies across New Mexico.
United Way levels the playing field to provide opportunity for every person in every community. Through a network of 1,800 community-based agencies throughout the United States and around the world, United Way addresses the particular challenges and aspirations of the local community it serves. Our Employee Giving Campaign is one of a number of ways we partner with United Way, including through charitable contributions to local United Ways, year-round volunteer opportunities and the promotion of our Internet Essentials program.
United Way agencies throughout our state are doing amazing work. In the Albuquerque metro area, United Way of Central New Mexico brings people and resources together to improve lives and strengthen our communities. Through its two initiatives, Mission: Families and Mission: Graduate, UWCNM supports a community-driven approach so more people can build the resources necessary for their families to thrive. Mission: Graduate collaborates with hundreds of community partners to develop and implement strategies to achieve the goal of 60,000 new graduates with college degrees and certificates by 2020.
Mission: Families launched in 2018 and creates a framework of strategies to support family resilience in order to reduce the incidence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which are traumatic events that can have life-long negative effects.
In Santa Fe, United Way has a two-pronged approach to achieve the vision that all children succeed in school and life. The first part of the solution is The Santa Fe Children’s Project, delivering high-quality early education programs across Santa Fe and Santa Fe County. Serving over 3,000 families per year, they provide home visiting, support for improved home-based childcare, free books for early literacy, and PreK education and childcare. New Mexico Early Childhood Development Partnership (NMECDP) is the second part of the solution, engaging important state-wide stakeholders in long-term economic and political strategies to increase access to early childhood education around the state.
At Comcast, we are proud to partner with these agencies to support these initiatives. You can read more about Comcast’s commitment to United Way here.