Alvaro Gutierrez: Hi and welcome to Project Access for All. We have two wonderful ladies here today. We have Jennifer Recine. She’s the external affairs person for AXA the company and we have the person and CEO of the AXA Foundation, Faith Frank, also with us. So thank you ladies for being with us today.

Jennifer Recine: Thank you for having us.

Alvaro Gutierrez: My pleasure and for any of you who wants to take this, tell us a little bit about the history of the AXA Foundation.

Faith Frank: The AXA Foundation is the philanthropic arm of AXA. So let me just describe a little bit about AXA. AXA is a company for perfaic company. It’s the world’s largest insurance company based headquarters in Paris, France with operations in over 60 countries around the world. Here in the United States we’re known as AXA, AXA US and we are the AXA Foundation is the philanthropic arm of AXA in the United States so we oversee all of the philanthropic giving, community service, corporate responsibility, and volunteer programs that go on in the united states as well as work with our international partners on programs that are done around the world on behalf of AXA. The foundation here in the United States was established in 1987. At that point the company was known as The equitable life insurance company and the company was called Equitable and then in 1991 and then officially in 1999 we became one company which is AXA and that’s when we changed the name of the AXA Foundation.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Can you tell us what is the main mission of the AXA Foundation?
Faith Frank: Sure. The main mission of the AXA Foundation is really to support the communities in which our customers, our employees, our financial professionals live and work. We are a company that is committed to helping people stay for their financial futures and we’re all we’re a company that’s inherently about protection and that’s really what the mission of the foundation is.

Alvaro Gutierrez: I learned that you had an involvement or at least a presence at the real abilities film festival in New York. Can you tell us about that?

Jennifer Recine: This is Jennifer. I can tell you about that. That actually was a companywide participation. Basically, at AXA, we have employee resource groups which are sort of support groups of that employees that go to and one of them are called AXA ABLE which stands for Awareness of Overcoming Barriers and Creating Lifestyle of Quality and this group sort of focuses on disability and disability awareness and for the past 5 years they’ve been participating in the real abilities film festival which is a film festival that is nationwide, that all the films have a disability focus disability awareness focus and this year was actually the New York the biggest film festival they ever had in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act which as you had mentioned is one of the big reasons why you’re doing this project as well. So, we actually are sponsoring the film festival for the first time this year for four different cities so we had Houston, New York just happened actually, and then we’re doing New Jersey and also Chicago, which are in September and November. And so basically, we had AXA advisers, who are experts in disability planning, go to many of the film events in New York to just be there in case anybody you know needed advice or anything as far as disability life planning or anything like that. We had many of our employees go to the film premier which was at the intrepid museum. The New York premier of the festival including our CEO and just to go and show our support so that was sort of very big big sponsorship for us, our first time sponsoring and I'm sure we’ll be doing it in the future and they’ll actual have a presence at the Chicago and New Jersey’s Festival as well in the coming months. So, something we’re very excited about. And it was a the New York festival was just great. The film as great, met a lot of amazing people so.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Now, in the same line, we know philanthropy we know a lot because we know (????) terms, terms that are very familiar in many very important for your organization. Can you tell us about the importance of these important terms?

Faith Frank: Sure. This is Faith again. I would say that equality is all of those terms are definitely embedded in in the mission and the programs of the AXA Foundation. You know, we no matter what peace of the funding we’re giving, we’re always looking at equality, diversity and making sure that we’re reaching as many groups of people, ethnicity of people whatever it may be and it’s open to all. I mean as we as I can actually go in now and kinda tell you about our main scholarship program which is our national scholarship program which is called AXA Achievement and through AXA Achievement, AXA has become one of the largest corporate sponsor of college scholarships. The program as launched in 2003 and since then we’ve given away 26 million dollars to over 5600 young people and our young people or we would like to call them AXA achievers, our scholarships winners are really truly amazing and the thing that’s a little different about our program is that we don’t even look at their grades or their transcript or their SAT/Act scores. It’s all based on amazing achievements that the that the students have done so it can be anything from overcoming a disability and using it to help others. It could be something around helping to create a water distribution program in India. It could be a dead basketball player who learned how to play basketball by the vibrations in the court, actually that was one of our first AXA achievers 30 years ago. We’ve found amazing young people who’ve written their own book. We have people who have tried to overcome obesity and kind of not only the thing that we really look for is AXA Achievers that did or have accomplished this amazing task but also that it reaches out to other people in their community. It could be other people like them, other people who are different form them. It could be children it could be adults but we really look for achievements that stretch throughout communities and I would tell you that our scholarship winners and again, this is our main program our scholarships range from 2500 to 25000 dollars and our scholarship winners are very diverse. I mean I’d say gender wise we are extremely diverse, ethnicity wise we are very diverse and again because of the type of achievements and we don’t focus on one unique you know one type of achievement whether it’s a sports achievement or an academic achievement that breeds a lot of diversity among the students that win and our scholarships are given to our students throughout the 50 states plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico so we cover the Gamut. There are some scholarships that can be used for any type of higher education whether its 2 year college or 4 year college and again, we have 5600 students that represent us around the country and around the world well they’re not students anymore, the ones who won earlier are now out in the CEOs of other company’s at this point but they’re really amazing students who’ve shown that what they’ve accomplished they have the ability to succeed in college and beyond and they come from all different socio economic backgrounds because we don’t ask for any information about financial need. You know again they’re very varied and really there only 1% of the population that’s not concerned about how they’re gonna pay for their college their students college education. I think it’s actually smaller than 1% so you know we definitely reach a huge audience.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Faith, what can you tell other organizations, other foundations in order for them to become a diverse and as worried about including everybody in the same old like your organization?

Faith Frank: Well I think that you know, every foundation whether it’s a corporate foundation or a family foundation or community foundation, the best that you know everyone we focus on one main cause other foundations you know focus on a couple different topics. Some don’t focus it all and just have rolling graph programs. So I don’t think there’s no right or wrong way to do it, it’s really what fits their their mission but as far as diversity I think, you know, you can’t operate as a company or as a foundation or as a nonprofit today without
looking at all of the population’s out there and and I say populations but all of the Jet whatever it may be, we’re a company as a whole that really focuses on diversity and inclusion as Jennifer mentioned when she was talking about AXA Able, that’s one of the nine employee resource groups we have and each one of them has a different topic. We have one that’s called AXA Cares which is all dedicated to the military and veterans. We have one that’s called AXA Black which focuses on history and progress of African Americans. We have one that’s called AXA Wow which is all about women. So we definitely focus on different areas and and you know some people find themselves very the amazing thing is you know out of that group someone could be fall under one two three of those categories because people aren’t just one thing anymore and I think that’s important for any company or charitable organization to realize.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Now, Faith, as a president and CEO of the AXA Foundation, what is one of the biggest dreams that you have for our society today?

Faith Frank: Wow that’s a big question. I would say one of the dreams that I have for society today is this is gonna be very personal but for people to be a little less angry. You know people a lot of times in society whether it’s around the economy or or injustices or whatever it may be people go to the negative before they go to the positive and they I think you know what I’d like to you know so whenever I feel like that I look at our AXA achievers and go wow look what they’ve accomplished already and they’re not even 18 years old yet so you know I would hope that society can you know sometimes it’s hard and but and I’m not and I’m not a the grass is always greener I’m not always a happy sunshine person but I think if people if our society held a little tighter onto the good things and tried, it would help
balance out the bad things so I would hope that the anger would dissipate a little bit because I think it gets in the way of progress sometimes.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Jennifer, what about you?

Jennifer Recine: I don’t know I really don’t think that I could I think that Faith’s answer was perfect and pretty much exactly what I would say as well, especially pertaining to what we do here at AXA and the AXA Foundation so.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Okay okay, so the things that the projects that you found, is this all across the United States or it’s only New York based?
Faith Frank: You mean the programs that we fund through the AXA Foundation?

Alvaro Gutierrez: Yes

Faith Frank: So the scholarships are all across the United States. When we offer our scholarships open for the year usually around when school begins in the fall on September and we have application possibilities in every state plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico and then comes so right now for 2015 the scholarships are closed and we actually are about within the next April 16th we will start announcing all of our winner which is a very exciting time. We have different groups of them, we have national winners so the national winner are one per state plus Washington and Puerto Rico so that’s 52 students. Among those 52 students, 42 of them win 10,000 dollars. Ten of them win 25000 so those are our really big big winners and they also win a computer from AXA and we highlight them through all different ways and they’ve all been notified already but but come April 16th Jennifer and her team really start telling the world whether it’s through social media just look for hash tag AXA achievement and it’s really wonderful because not only are we promoting the kids and we’re honoring them and we have videos of them on our website and but we’re also showing that our company it really ties into who we are as a company because as I said before, we’re a company that help people save for their futures. A lot people are saving for college, we want people to start thinking about it. You know when your when your child applies for a scholarship, they’re a senior in college, the time of saving for college is done so we want people to start thinking about it a lot earlier so when you go to our site and you see about our winners we try to show people that there is not only do we focus on scholarships we focus on you know the products that we sell and the and the financial services we provide also are very noble and life insurance is a very noble product and and we really try to help people prepare for all phases of their lives whether its sending their kid to college, planning on their retirement on a beach in Columbia or you know whatever it whatever it may be. So yeah they’re all across the United States. And then the second part is we start announcing our community scholarship winners which are smaller scholarships, 2500 dollars and they very much line to our branches and we have 50 branches across the country in all different places from Tennessee to new Orleans everywhere, a few in California and so each one of those branches awards a few local awards. So, we have all different levels of scholarships and they really cover the entire United States.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Wow. That was powerful, Faith. And for our listeners, they may be thinking, okay, how it’s not easy, I suppose Faith, we’re in the 21
st century, to keep a foundation going. There are many things that we need to have and you need money mostly, how do you stay in business as they say today?

Faith Frank: Well a corporate foundation I would say operates a little differently than other foundations. So we are the philanthropic arm of AXA so we have one donor and that’s AXA. So we are some foundations are endowed foundations which means they have a core money that’s invested and they give away a percentage of that every year. Some you know every company a little differently but I will tell you that there’s not I mean I can’t think of any most most corporations especially in the United States have some type of charitable arm because as a company today you can’t operate whatever business if you’re in manufacturing or you’re in B to B or you’re in to product whatever it may be, you know that you know you need to give back and you need to help support those issues that matter to you and your employees and your constituents and you need to give back and it’s a part of every good corporate citizenship corporate culture, corporate DNA. So again it’s different I mean a family foundation is usually funded by the family, a community foundation accepts donations. So every foundation operates a little differently but we are our sole donor is AXA.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Now, I think this is for for Jennifer. Last question, can you tell us about websites, social media and everything to the AXA Foundation and the AXA Company?

Jennifer Recine: The AXA Foundation website, you could go to www.axa.us.com and you’ll find a link for it on there. The actual long link I wouldn’t read out right now but I encourage everybody to check it out. We are in the process of revamping it right now so it will be live
when we announce our winners in April.

Faith Frank: April 16th!

Jennifer Recine: April 16th. So and we’re gonna be launching a social media campaign, our twitter handle is AXA so A-X-A underscore US and we’re gonna be announcing the winners, doing profiles in the winter. We’re gonna do a lot of different stuff so you definitely have to check the hash tag AXA achievement there’s gonna be a lot of activity going on this year.

Faith Frank: One of the greatest things is we’re awarding the scholarships 17 and 18 year olds and they know more about social media than we do so we and we have no problem asking them for help so all of our AXA achievers have recorded videos that we’re gonna have on our website that we’re gonna use on social media and They’re all its very easy to ask them to tweet about it and I don’t even know all the language tweet about it instagram whatever the language is but they’re all on board because it promotes the it promotes AXA so we definitely are lucky and that our our scholarship winners are so excite to help and spread the word.

Jennifer Recine: Right and on our website, the foundation website you can also get information on how to apply for next year’s scholarships. So all the information will be on there.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Jennifer is there an email address?

Faith Frank: Well you know we hesitate to do that. I would say definitely go to the website and most questions are answered from there and again its Axa.us.com or Axa.com and you can actually get to any AXA entity from there if you’re in the United States its automatic. So yeah that’s what I would definitely tell people who wanna learn more about about what we do and what our foundation does.

Alvaro Gutierrez: Faith and Jennifer thank you so much for everything and more especially for the work you are doing at the AXA Foundation and the AXA Company as well.

Faith Frank: Thank you for having us today!

Jennifer Recine: Yes thank you so much.

Alvaro Gutierrez: It’s my pleasure and before I finish this show for our listeners, remember that we also have social media, so you can go into Facebook at Project Access For All. You can follow us on Twitter at Project Access for All. You can visit our website at www.projectaccessforall.org and you can email us at Podcast@projectaccessforall.org. So from Alvaro, from AVS and Project Access For All, have a wonderful day.