Social
Growing entrepreneurism in our rangatahi
Deloitte New Zealand is working towards impacting 25,000 lives by 2030 through education opportunities and skills development. It’s our part in Deloitte’s Global WorldClass strategy to empower 100 million people by 2030 through programs and partnerships with leading educational organizations around the world.
One of the ways we’re doing this is through our Deloitte Grow signature social impact programme – a key part of our commitment to encourage entrepreneurism and financial literacy. The 4–5 week programme inspires young people to think of themselves as social entrepreneurs, fostering innovative approaches to business. Our professionals play a pivotal role as coaches, guiding rangatahi to develop and launch their business ideas.
Over the last year, we’ve seen an increased need from several of our Grow school partners to bridge the gap between school and industry, particularly in helping senior students from low socio-economic areas identify future study and career paths. In response, we’ve extended the programme to include ‘Grow Pathways’ – one-off sessions where our professionals present as speakers, share their own study and career journeys, and take students through an activity related to their jobs.
Corporate Finance analyst Haisley Bell says, “I find it important to do my part in creating awareness around the potential career paths available to our youth. I’m extremely grateful to have been able to help spread this message by way of our Grow Pathway sessions and hope to continue doing so in future”
At Deloitte, we aspire to make meaningful, positive change. Through our WorldImpact portfolio of initiatives, we focus on making a tangible impact on society’s biggest challenges and creating a more sustainable and equitable world.
Whether through our work with clients or community initiatives, we focus on broader outcomes and better futures for New Zealanders. A significant part of this is investing in education and skills development to tackle inequity and create opportunities for people in Aotearoa. We’re encouraging women, girls and gender minorities into STEM, technology, and cyber pathways. We offer mentoring for students and young leaders. We support social enterprises and not-for-profit organisations. And when communities were affected by the flooding in Auckland and Cyclone Gabrielle, we jumped in to support them.
Our day-to-day work connects to our purpose. We’re proud to invest our pro bono and volunteer time in the communities where we live and work right across Aotearoa. Through our impact initiatives WorldClass, WorldClimate, ALL IN, and Impact Every Day, we’re leveraging our people’s professional capabilities to help build better futures in our communities.
In FY23 we collaborated with ten high schools to deliver Deloitte Grow and Grow Pathways, supporting 426 rangatahi youth to explore new skills and think differently about their future.
Matt Cicchini, Head of Waitākere College’s Commerce department said that Grow Pathways was of great benefit, giving students the opportunity to speak to mentors passionate about their careers, saying that “The students obtain a real-life view of prudential careers, and it opens their eyes to careers they never thought existed.’’
Investing in education for a brighter future
A lack of quality learning and education opportunities prevents many around the world from achieving their full potential and limits economies from growing and innovating. We believe that investing in education and skills is the solution to creating opportunity, progress, and a better future for all.
Deloitte is focused on initiatives that nurture and support learning opportunities in our communities – and our scholarships are a testament to this. In FY23, our Māori services team Hourua Pae Rau launched their Tīheru scholarship and our Pasifika services team Pås Peau, their Le Lumana'i scholarship, respectively. These scholarships offer financial contributions to Māori and Pasifika students who are at the beginning of their tertiary education journey and include a paid summer internship in their penultimate year of study.
What makes these scholarships successful is that they offer so much more than financial assistance. Both the Hourua Pae Rau and Pås Peau communities offer wrap-around support for the scholarship recipients, with mentoring, networking and professional development throughout their studies. Recipients of our Tīheru and Le Lumana'i scholarships are engaged and welcomed as part of our community, as whānau and aiga.
Leilani, one of our 2023 Le Lumana'i scholarship recipients, says the experience “was a pivotal point in my journey as a young Pasifika woman who continually trailblazes in the enterprise and business spaces. It has allowed me to embark on my corporate career and establish valuable connections with both the Pås Peau team and the wider Deloitte team. I am thrilled to begin my Consulting Analyst Internship this summer at the Auckland office."
In FY23 we celebrated nine Tīheru recipients and five Le Lumana'i recipients and look forward to welcoming more in 2024.
Fostering inclusion in the tech space
Wellington’s Cloud Native Summit is a community conference focused on Cloud Transformation. Upholding our value of hāpai tangata – foster inclusion – the Deloitte Cloud & Engineering (C&E) team was the Main Diversity Supporter at the September event.
We were also the primary diversity sponsor for the scholarship programme, providing complimentary access to the conference for 40 attendees. The programme is committed to breaking down barriers to entry into the tech space, particularly for underrepresented groups. Alice Jowsey, Specialist - Cloud & Engineering, was key in working with organisations like TupuToa and Dev Academy Aotearoa to find promising candidates.
After the event, Alice told scholarship attendees about Deloitte internships, cadetships, and opportunities like the AWS Hāpori Wāhine She Builds programme. We wanted the attendees to be inspired by technology, hear distinguished tech speakers and network with our tech community.
“The summit is more than just a conference – it's a local platform for invaluable networking opportunities,” Alice said. “I appreciate the broad extension to building community in such an inclusive environment.”
C&E Specialist Natalia Nam led the way with a presentation at the pre-conference on DevOps transformation with Azure DevOps (ADO) – a tool used by the Deloitte team to track tasks, priorities and software releases. Natalia discussed the importance of adaptability and using Azure DevOps to stay competitive in the fast-paced world of software development; “By streamlining your processes, improving collaboration, and ensuring the security of your code, you can deliver high-quality software faster than ever before.”
Good thinking, great outcomes
Pro bono engagements form a core part of our social and environmental impact. Each year our firm contributes thousands of hours towards meaningful pro bono work in Aotearoa.
Good Thinking is the name of our Consulting business unit’s signature initiative, through which our people can get involved and donate time and expertise. The aim is to solve socially important problems by working closely with organisations and projects doing good in communities across Aotearoa.
Good Thinking was established in the last financial year and resulted in a contribution of 1,496 hours on 28 different projects across nine different communities. Now that the initiative is established, our aim is to triple the contribution to 6,000 hours.
We carefully select the projects we take on under the Good Thinking initiative based on the potential for the most impactful outcomes and alignment with our WorldImpact strategy.
Serving our communities
Our purpose as a firm is to make an impact that matters. We bring this to life by using our expertise to support our clients, as well as our broader communities to solve their challenges on important environmental and social impact projects.
Our people have eight hours of annual volunteering leave available and opportunities to contribute towards pro bono engagements and fundraising efforts. In 2023 alone, this translated into 8,000 pro bono hours and more than 5,000 volunteering hours to the benefit of communities across Aotearoa.
One example is our Wellington and Dunedin offices’ work with student-run not-for-profit organisation Ignite Consultants – a business consultancy that works with charities. Our people offer support by hosting training sessions and providing facilitators to teach the students key skills and tools. In addition, they mentor the students for nine weeks, helping the team deliver design-driven solutions to their clients. This year our team supported 70 university students to help community organisations make an even greater difference.
Volunteering also enables our people to learn and grow. In 2021, in response to the increasingly tight market for tech talent, Deloitte introduced the Cadetship Programme to help people from diverse backgrounds earn as they learn and gain the qualifications, certifications and skills required to be successful at Deloitte. This year’s cohort volunteered with Everybody Eats, a project which aims to provide nourishing meals to those who need them, whilst reducing food waste. As well as helping out at Everybody Eats’ community dinner service, the cadets gained an insight into what it takes to run a successful social enterprise.
Empowering women in STEM
WorldClass is Deloitte’s global strategy to impact 100 million people by 2030 through educational programmes and partnerships. One of the ways we’re contributing is by working with others in Aotearoa to encourage and empower women and girls into STEM pathways.
The tech industry is growing and we need more people and more diverse thought leaders to support its needs. More female representation in STEM is essential to ensure future capacity, capability and successful growth in this area.
The shortage of women in tech roles is something TechWomen, a group of passionate tech, digital and ICT-focused individuals, is tackling with the support of NZTech. Deloitte New Zealand is a Foundation Partner. As an organisation with a strong contingent of women in technology roles, this creates opportunities for them to further develop their skills and help inspire young women to explore tech as a future career. For several years, our people have supported TechWomen initiatives such as Mentoring Circles and ShadowTech Day.
Mentoring Circles are supportive spaces for tech practitioners early in their careers. The circles offer peer group mentoring, discussions for non-technical aspects of career development and support with career path planning and development. Our people are involved in two ways – either as young tech practitioners joining as mentees or as facilitators and mentors.
ShadowTech Day is a ‘day in the life’ experience for secondary school students where young women can shadow professionals at a local tech organisation for a day. The students get to sit in on meetings, witness ways of working, and learn about the pathways women have taken into tech-centric roles. The goal is to help break down barriers for young women interested in the field. Several of our offices are facilitators and hosts.
We look forward to strengthening our relationship with TechWomen over the coming years.
Women+ in Cyber – inspiring future careers
In 2022, the Wellington Cyber team kicked off its Deloitte Women+ in Cyber initiative, aiming to encourage women and other gender minorities to consider a career in the cybersecurity industry.
Women and gender minorities are underrepresented in the cyber industry. The Women+ on the Cyber team have experienced the impact of this first-hand during their career paths, so they wanted to give other women, girls, and gender minorities the opportunity to see a career in cyber as an option.
Women+ in Cyber runs free workshops and large-scale assemblies for high school students in Wellington to increase awareness of cybersecurity careers and teach students practical skills on how to stay safe online. Workshops include activities, personal stories, insights, and experiences shared by members of our Cyber team.
Senior Consultants Issy Riddell-Garner and Catherine Alvarez are the Women+ in Cyber Wellington chapter co-leads.
“We’ve created the outreach we wish we had when we were younger, which is very healing,” explained Catherine.
Issy wanted to be a zookeeper until she accidentally joined the robotics team at school, sparking an interest in computer science. “Women tend to stumble into this field, but our initiative wants to give more kids this spark from the onset,” said Issy.
Women+ in Cyber is underpinned by our Deloitte value hāpai tangata – fostering inclusion – and accelerates us towards our Deloitte WorldClass goal to develop job skills, improve educational outcomes and expand opportunities for 25,000 people in New Zealand by 2030.
“We want to make sure that people outside of Deloitte benefit from Deloitte values because, after all, they’re meant for us to help make Aotearoa a better place,” says Catherine.
Collaborating for an impact that matters
Our purpose is to make an impact that matters and we’re proud to work with clients who share this ethos. So, when we discovered our client ASB was volunteering their expertise to support Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Auckland, we offered to help on a pro bono basis.
MS Auckland provides information, support and advocacy to assist people affected by Multiple Sclerosis to live better lives. ASB was working with them to better understand the needs of their members (people living with the disease) and how they can improve engagement. We were able to enhance this project by providing ASB with our DTermineTM survey platform.
Deloitte Partner Ian Tuke explained, “we thought we could help by bringing our mahi tahi (collaborate for measurable impact) and manaaki (take care of each other) values to the table, because making an impact that matters is at the core of what we do too!”
ASB’s Design Practice applied their deep experience in revealing customer journeys and needs by completing qualitative interviews with MS sufferers. Deloitte’s Risk Advisory team, provided a significant contribution to this by designing and running a quantitative phase.
“Our DTermineTM survey platform resulted in the addition of much-needed insights from hundreds of people with MS,” said Ian. “It felt great to help reveal some issues that had not been understood by MS Auckland – until now”.
ASB and Deloitte shared our collective insights with a group of MS Auckland community advisors, Board members and General Manager Nicola Bitossi. This included a journey map and quantitative insights on the key stages that members experience from the onset of MS symptoms, through to treatment and later stages of the disease. The MS Auckland team were thrilled, especially with the feedback around how to improve support for people recently diagnosed with MS.
This initiative acknowledges the amazing work our clients do within their own communities and showcases how collaboration can deliver an impact that matters.
Supporting diverse young leaders of the future
Deloitte is proud to be the inaugural sponsor of Multiethnic Young Leaders NZ (or MYLN's) 3 Kapu Kawhe initiative.
MYLN was founded to be a catalyst for change and to champion diversity in leadership in New Zealand. Launched in 2023, 3 Kapu Kawhe is a mentoring programme pairing leaders with different backgrounds and at different stages in their careers for three inspiring conversations. The programme purposefully connects mentors and mentees from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to introduce individuals who might not otherwise cross paths in life.
The mentees, young leaders early in their careers, are paired with experienced New Zealand executives and directors for three life-changing conversations. The mentees then pay it forward by meeting for three casual conversations with a student leader in tertiary education or their final year of high school.
The initiative aims to give the mentees and mentors an opportunity to learn from each other, share valuable insights and wisdom and gain greater professional and cultural confidence. It draws on Te Ao Māori concepts of whakawhanaungatanga (building connections) and ako (two-way learning).
Speakers at the launch event included MYLN board members Te Ariki Te Puni (Māori Vice-Chair) and Michelle Huang (Chair and Interim GM). Deloitte Chief Executive Mike Horne was also in attendance and was one of this year’s programme mentors.
In his speech, Mike acknowledged that hāpai tangata (fostering inclusion) is one of Deloitte's shared values and underpins everything we do as a firm. ’’We know the young leaders of today are those who will impact and shape the Aotearoa of tomorrow,’’ he said. “It's important we all do our part to empower a representative cross-section of our society to build a thriving, inclusive and equitable future for all.”
