Corporate Social Responsibility

Skills-based volunteering involves individuals using their professional experience and expertise on a pro bono basis in support of nonprofit organizations and their communities. For the third consecutive year, members of New York Life’s Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CDSAi) team did just that. This year, the team volunteered in support of two bereavement centers.

Both New York Life Foundation grant recipients, Los Angeles-based OUR HOUSE and Baltimore-based Roberta’s House leveraged the specialized expertise of New York Life’s data scientists and data engineers to identify successes and shifting trends in their respective communities, uncover actionable insights, and plan for the future.

According to Elsa Stefanian, LCSW, Clinical Director of Adult Programs at OUR HOUSE, “The data analysis provided by New York Life’s professionals has empowered and inspired our team. We now have confidence in knowing what we have done historically. With this foundation, we can strategically plan for the future using the team’s findings to guide our program decisions, inform our efforts to address justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion organizationally, and structure our data collection moving forward. We had all of the pieces, but this project and the New York Life team helped us connect the dots and turn the pieces into something immensely useful.” 

For Roberta’s House, the team interpreted the organization’s data to showcase positive impacts over the years. Roberta’s House Executive Director, Veronica Land-Davis, summarized the project in saying, “The New York Life Skills-Based Volunteer Program matched Roberta’s House with a dynamic data science team that brought a diverse set of skills and went above and beyond the scope of the project. As a result of this partnership, Roberta’s House now has best practices in place to truly measure how we heal the hearts and minds of bereaved children and families.”

“Leveraging our team’s professional experience in support of these worthy nonprofits was incredibly humbling and rewarding,” explained Rita Fuller, data scientist with New York Life’s Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. “We look forward to continuing to support nonprofits by volunteering the specialized data science skills of the CDSAi team in this way.”

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