Project Description
| FINALIST: | MetLife | |
| Entry Title: | LifeChanger – Building Financial Inclusion in our Communities | |
| Talk Title: | Building Financial Inclusion among Young People | |
| Category: | Educating Young People (Corporate Responsibility) | |
| Sector: | Financial Services | |
| OVERVIEW | ||
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MetLife employees were challenged to bring its new global focus on financial inclusion to life at a dedicated innovation session. Their solution – conceived, developed and launched by employees – was LifeChanger, MetLife’s first regional CSR initiative.
Funded by MetLife Foundation and partnering with Junior Achievement – a global non-profit youth organisation – trained MetLife volunteers go into schools and build children’s understanding of basic financial concepts, eg learning how to save and invest for the future. After piloting in four countries in 2014, LifeChanger has been rolled out to 20 countries with more than 600 volunteers engaging over 12,000 children. |
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| IMPACT | ||
| MetLife LifeChanger has positively impacted the lives of more than 12,000 young people in 20 countries across EMEA aged 5 to 18 in just one year helping to build financial inclusion.
Over 600 MetLife employees (12%) volunteered to participate and were trained to work with children in schools. Feedback from all parties has been exceptionally positive. Employees welcomed the opportunity to actively engage with and educate children. The programme has also strengthened international links with MetLife’s long-term CSR partner Junior Achievement (JA) which developed course material and trained volunteers. JA has already recognised LifeChanger for its Volunteer levels in Portugal. |
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| INNOVATION | ||
| Employees were challenged to find ways to build financial inclusion in disadvantaged communities across EMEA. The LifeChanger idea needed to be simple and flexible.
It emerged from structured brainstorming and filtering at a MetLife EMEA Innovation Summit. It was presented to employees along with other competing concepts and won an employee vote. Seed funding from the MetLife Foundation allowed rapid progress to a pilot launch in four countries. It’s instant success and feedback from children, teachers, volunteers and JA made for an easy decision to roll LifeChanger out across EMEA. |
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| INSPIRATION | ||
| LifeChanger’s success is in large part due to the fact that it was conceived, developed and launched by MetLife’s employees.
Employee engagement and ownership of the initiative is real. Empowering and challenging employees to solve a problem has produced excellent results. There is a vast resource of knowledge, experience, creativity and ideas waiting to be tapped. It also provided an excellent development opportunity for volunteers. The turnkey nature of LifeChanger means new markets are easily onboarded. JA relationships globally and regionally enable local teams to benefit from best practices from markets that already have launched. |
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