The NeuroLeadership Institute’s
Commitment to Corporate and Social Responsibility

Throughout our 26-year history, we have had a singular focus – to make organizations more human through science. Our goal is for our employees, partners, and clients to see themselves, their work, and their worlds in new ways as they follow science.

Our Actions to Demonstrate Social Responsibility

NLI feels a deep responsibility to contribute positively to our society. From our inception in 1996, we have championed educational and nonprofit organizations. Our reduced fees allow these organizations, often with modest budgets, access to our consulting and training resources to deliver on their important missions.

In January 2018, NLI began partnering with the Pajama Program to provide NYC based employees the opportunity to join a Reading Party, during which vulnerable children from all NYC boroughs are paired with an adult volunteer to spend an hour reading together. After each party, the children receive a new pair of pajamas and their favorite book from the bookshelf. NLI has chosen to partner with this program as reading is essential for a child’s brain development and helps to build key language, literacy, and social skills.

NLI offered free de-escalation training to all local, state, and federal law enforcement officers throughout 2020. NLI rooted the session in the neuroscience of threat and offered strategies to mitigate challenging interactions. We partnered with MILO Range, a world leader in simulation training, and Joe Smarro, Emmy award winning Peace Officer from Crisis Cops to bring law enforcement expertise to our design.

Also in 2020 we began a partnership with Per Scholas, an organization dedicated to building a more diverse technical workforce by creating on-ramps for women and people of color (groups staggeringly underrepresented in IT employment today). Per Scholas is working to create equity by empowering people of color with tools, skills, and professional development. Our staff volunteers have worked with dozens of Per Scholas students to provide resume review and rewriting sessions that include mock interviews and continue to do so quarterly.

Our Your Brain at Work blog, podcast, and Friday webinar series has helped tens of thousands of attendees’ cope with the COVID crisis, social unrest and issues facing society today. These efforts reflect our sense of responsibility to our community and our eagerness to use neuroscience to positively contribute to the enormous challenges facing our world.

Our Commitment to a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce

NLI dedicates significant resources to diversity, equity, and inclusion research as a fundamental part of our mission. Over 35% of our employees in North America are of diverse, minority backgrounds. Our recruitment and selection process is geared towards increasing the diversity within NLI even further. And 68% of our North American workforce identifies as female.

NLI’s co-founder and 50% co-owner serves as our Chief Innovation Officer.  We seek to further diversify our talent through partnerships with 8a companies when client initiatives call for such expertise. Our pool of partners are identified through events that target potential small business, small, disadvantaged business, veteran-owned small business, service-disabled veteran-owned small business, small HUBZone business, and small women-owned business. Our diverse partners bring expertise in consulting, facilitation, and instructional design as required to meet our client’s needs.

Environment and Sustainability

Our sustainability commitment focuses on efficient and effective solutions that are better for society and the environment by promoting the following actions:

• Decrease of carbon footprint
• Reuse
• Recycle
• Reduce over-consumption
• Diversity
• Decentralization and more

Since January 2017, long before COVID 19 altered many organization’s strategies, NLI emphasized ways to successfully navigate our business virtually with a “work-from-almost-anywhere-in-North-America” policy and delivering 60% of our client solutions virtually. We take a strong no distance bias approach to hiring, to find the best people, regardless of their location. The bonus is a smaller office footprint worldwide and a measurable reduction in commuting hours.

Since the beginning, we designed our work to meet both in person and virtual requirements – including planning, implementation, and delivery methods that are an efficient and effective way to serve our clients. The pandemic allowed us to seamlessly pivot to all virtual deliverables.

Our focus is behavior change, and the shift to virtual and digital solutions have proven to clients that they can offer highly effective brain based solutions while realizing a measurable reduction in travel and their carbon footprint.

Our attention is on real business change and innovations, efficiency improvements, materials reduction, and other carbon emission elimination strategies. We provide only digital materials, emphasize re-use and recycle (key organizational goals) and reducing consumption.

Our employees are committed to identifying new ways each year to increase our sustainability and we recognize that millennials are more likely to choose an organization that shares their values, and “will go out of their way to work for a company that demonstrates a genuine commitment to corporate social responsibility, environment, and sustainability”.

We monitor the environmental and social impact of our organization continuously to improve our performance. We are committed to a more regenerative business both within and for our clients – where going to work and allowing people to do their best work will leave the organization better than before. By doing so, we can create a sustainable future and – with a little innovation and intelligence – continue to live in a clean world.