Corporate Responsibility

Landscape

While the firm has operated in Greater Washington for more than 50 years, over the past decade we have made a concerted effort to advance our business footprint by opening new branches, hiring local employees, lending to small businesses and contributing in other ways. We have intentionally invested in areas where we can grow alongside communities and help residents achieve financial security, especially in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, two cities with significant racial wealth divides.

Our approach

We have pursued initiatives to address these disparities and lift up the region's residents and workforce.

• In D.C., we provided $3 million to help launch the Congress Heights Community Training and Development Corporation's (CHCTDC) small business career and skills building incubator in Wards 7 and 8.
• We partnered with Baltimore's Mayor's Office of Employment Development to launch our Baltimore Virtual Call Center, hiring 40 Baltimore-based customer service specialists and leaders.
• Working with the Greater Washington Partnership and Education Strategy Group – and with support from local government leaders in D.C., Maryland and Virginia – we recommitted $5.4 million to the TalentReady initiative to support the preparation of high school students across the region for in-demand careers, building on our previous commitment that engaged more than 25,000 students across five school districts.

Featured above: Our team at the Baltimore Virtual Call Center launch.

Our impact in action

We first worked with Monica Ray at CHCTDC, where she had served as the organization's executive director for more than two decades. Monica has devoted her career to her community, attracting investment to help improve Wards 7 and 8's low homeownership and high poverty and unemployment rates. After years of collaborating on CHCTDC initiatives and the opening of Chase's Community Center Branch in Skyland Town Center, Monica shared her vision about helping to launch a small business career and skills building incubator.

"We are providing support and coaching for promising new businesses, as well as for entrepreneurs still in the idea stage," she says. "Our JPMorgan Chase partnership helps us arm these socially and economically disadvantaged women entrepreneurs with the processes and systems they need to succeed in their business ventures."

Monica and her team have already helped launch 83 new businesses and are growing 47 more, creating jobs and building individual and community wealth.

Landscape

The U.K. has long been an important market for our firm. With over 22,000 employees, our offerings have continued to grow with the 2021 launch of the Chase digital consumer bank and the expansion in the U.K. of our commercial banking, investment banking and asset management businesses. While our presence has evolved, the country’s economic landscape has experienced historic changes, with ongoing income inequality and nearly 22% of U.K. residents living in poverty.

Our approach

To address some of the challenges facing the U.K., we have focused on helping businesses succeed, supporting individuals as they build a strong financial future and connecting people to job opportunities. This has included committing $64 million in philanthropic capital over the past five years, alongside the firm’s active employee volunteerism programs, civic partnerships, and close engagements with government and nonprofits. We have also promoted efforts to boost the U.K.’s leadership in sustainable finance, providing input on a report offering recommendations the U.K. can take to unlock capital at scale to transition to a more sustainable energy system.

Examples of our work to benefit local communities and economic growth include:

• The Aspiring Professionals Program (APP), run in collaboration with the Social Mobility Foundation, works to connect talented young people from low-income backgrounds with work and mentorship experiences at JPMorgan Chase.
• The Founders Forward mentoring program pairs women entrepreneurs in the U.K. with JPMorgan Chase mentors, who provide business strategy and leadership development guidance.

Our impact in action

Over the past five years, our collective work with nonprofits has helped more than 33,000 people reduce their debts and improve their financial health. We have also provided resources to support the growth of over 10,000 small businesses and place 9,000+ individuals into apprenticeships or full- or part-time positions.

Since launching in 2012, the APP has supported more than 800 young people, 86% of whom began full-time employment at JPMorgan Chase or other firms within 15 months of graduation. Radhika, currently a vice president with the firm’s Global Rates team, enrolled in APP. She credits the program with helping her build the skills she needed for the interview process and now in her sales role at the firm.

Featured above: Elle

Founders Forward is also changing lives. Approximately 240 women entrepreneurs in the U.K. have participated in the program. This includes Elle, whose business won a startup accelerator competition and expanded to the United States. In addition to the U.K., we are proud to offer Founders Forward in France and Germany, further embedding our commitment to fostering entrepreneurship into the fabric of our global company.

Landscape

Texas is home to our largest employee base in the United States. With many companies like ours recognizing Texas as a great place to do business, the state is currently experiencing a skilled-labor shortage, specifically in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This local challenge will persist: Although 85% of living-wage jobs in Dallas County require education beyond a high school degree, as of 2017, 73% of Texas’ students were not able to receive postsecondary credentials within six years, largely due to financial obstacles.

Our approach

To help young people access educational and skills training opportunities, we began advising and funding data-driven nonprofits, including the Commit Partnership and Tarrant To & Through (T3) Partnership, coalitions of school systems, higher education institutions, local and state governments, foundations, employers and workforce agencies, among others.

While these organizations work to address compounding issues that impact student success and graduation rates, our commitments are deliberately focused on initiatives where we have expertise and insights to add the greatest value. In 2023, we committed:

• $1.5 million to The Commit Partnership's Opportunity 2040 Plan Phase 1 to support a comprehensive 18-year investment plan to help improve the long-term financial health of 150,000 current students by 2040.
• $750,000 to the T3 Pathways to Careers (P2C) platform to provide a virtual college-to-career resource to help parents and students understand what's needed to pursue industry-based credentials, degrees, certifications and job opportunities.

We also promote policies at the local, state and federal levels that align with our goals. Since 2022, we have been a vocal champion of Texas's House Bill 8 legislation that creates a new funding model that incentivizes community colleges in Texas to ensure that more students complete certificates and other credentials or transfer to a four-year university to complete their undergraduate degree.

Our impact in action

Halfway through the first year, Commit2Dallas's Opportunity 2040 Plan has already met 87% of its year 1 goal: to help an additional 7,700 students reach educational benchmarks that put them on a pathway to well-paying jobs. This work is touching Dallas County families like the Donjuans, whose oldest daughter Annahi will graduate from the University of North Texas at Dallas this spring. "I'm the first on both sides of my family … to obtain higher education," says Annahi. "I decided to attend college in order to start saving and serve as a role model for my siblings."

We are seeing a similar impact from our T3 P2C commitment. Over the next six months, T3 will integrate its platform with the registration process for all Fort Worth Independent School District middle school students, which will give approximately 15,000 students valuable information about educational opportunities at various high schools and careers they can pursue as an adult.

Landscape

For more than 160 years, our firm has served Chicago, a city ripe with business opportunities – along with its share of challenges. Between 2017 and 2019, several reports captured the stark segregation and inequities among communities in Chicago, underscoring devastating impacts on economic vitality.

Our approach

Looking at this research and findings from the JPMorgan Chase Institute, we recognized an opportunity to change the decades-long trajectory of the city's South and West Sides from disinvestment to revitalization. Following conversations with policymakers and residents, we focused on addressing the city's affordable home shortage as an opportunity to catalyze wealth building.

To leverage vacant city-owned land, CR deepened partnerships with nonprofits building affordable homes in coordination with local government, including The Resurrection Project, Reclaiming Chicago and the Chicago Community Trust. These organizations target city blocks to acquire and build homes, supporting individual and community wealth. They also connect people with affordable mortgages and help them plan for costs like maintenance and repairs. Additionally, our businesses combined expertise to make one of our largest-ever affordable housing investments in redeveloping the Lawson YMCA into 400+ affordable housing units.

Our impact in action

We see returns on our commitments in the pride and promise of new homeowners, including Janay, a public school teacher. Janay saved part of every paycheck to purchase her first home and put down roots.

Featured above: Janay

"As a teacher, building a sense of community is one of the first things I do with my students at the beginning of the year. It is a way of making students feel safe, valued and supported. This home does the same for me," she reports.

Janay's inspiring story is one of many. Housing production from a collaborative of organizations—funded in part through grants from JPMorgan Chase—surged from 19 homes in 2022 to 79 homes in 2023, demonstrating significant progress toward the collaborative's goal of scaling production to more than 100 homes per year through 2030.

This is just the beginning. In addition to deploying $1.1 million in home loans and raising $50 million toward lending and home construction, our grantees have leveraged our philanthropic support to secure another 500 city-owned vacant lots and gain funding from the state of Illinois focused on assisting with down payments and closing appraisal gaps.

The essence of our work outlined above can be captured in three words: We show up. As listeners, learners and community partners, we come to the table – real, tangible tables – ready to create avenues to economic opportunity.

At these various tables, we ask: "What's working?" We examine our investments with our colleagues across the firm and external partners, gaining an understanding of how winning approaches can be scaled to markets around the world. Our team's work ensuring that policymakers know the value we bring to communities becomes all the more important as we seek to scale solutions during this uncertain political moment. It is in tandem with elected officials and other stakeholders that we have brought, and will continue to bring, the right products and services to our clients and customers.

And when we show up, in good and in tough times, we will bring our holistic model, positioning ourselves to grow and truly be the bank for the place we are in, in every market we serve. We take this responsibility seriously. It is a privilege to bank more than 88 million customers and small businesses. It is a privilege to support schools, hospitals and other community institutions. But perhaps most of all, it is a privilege to lead by example, demonstrating through our business success that the private sector has a role to play in shaping a stronger, more inclusive economy for everyone.

Tim Berry
Global Head of Corporate Responsibility
Chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Region