Over the years, we’ve realized that the passion our people have for the charities and organizations they care about helps shape their personalities and drive them to succeed and we wanted to be a part of that. In 2017, we created a Charity Committee that is responsible for reviewing requests for charitable donations and allocating funds on behalf of the company.
By becoming involved with our employees’ different organizations, programs, and charities, we grow closer to our employees and the places we call home.
Catherine Chia-Calabria, a Senior Manager of Structural Engineering in our Philadelphia office, requested funds for the B.R.I.D.G.E. Lab, which was founded by her daughter, Kristin, a Marriage & Family Therapist with the mission of eliminating systemic oppression in schools through mental health-based group work.
The B.R.I.D.G.E. Lab works with Southern California's most impoverished schools to serve students from primarily minority communities. Since these schools already struggle with many of their basic needs, they often overlook or do not have the ability to provide mental health care in all but the direst of cases. The non-profit works with teachers and students to foster social and emotional well-being through movement/yoga, mindfulness/meditation/ breathing, along with advocacy and education. This gives students the skills necessary to navigate childhood adversities/trauma brought on by economic and societal circumstances. These skills create positive outcomes - when students feel calm, they behave better, concentrate better, and perform better academically.
"The most useful part of the B.R.I.D.G.E. program is recognizing your feelings and why you feel that way and how you can express it in a healthy way."
- 9th-grade student in the program, O'Farrell Charter School
Funding from McCormick Taylor will help the organization bridge this gap in care. Through their innovative, 200-hour Social-Emotional Learning platform, trained clinicians use evidence-based methods to help students build tools to decrease anxiety and depression while increasing resilience, emotional regulation, and self-esteem. Students acquire skills for healing, managing stress, and self-regulation. The B.R.I.D.G.E. Lab also performs similar work with teachers and caregivers to address the systems surrounding young people and create a uniform language between the three populations.
"This grant will help expand our programming to more underserved schools. We can't thank McCormick Taylor enough for their generosity." - Kristin Calabria, Founder & CEO
Learn more or donate to the B.R.I.D.G.E Lab here.
Learn more about the other organizations that our Charity Committee supports here.
