A Vision for Corporate Philanthropy from a Philadelphia Leader

For a discussion on corporate social responsibility, who better to share insights than a leader from the company with the largest corporate philanthropic footprint in Philadelphia?

Dalila Wilson-Scott, Senior Vice President, Community Impact at the Comcast Corporation and President of the Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation, visited Corporate Responsibility Management: Performance with Purpose, an undergraduate course taught by Daniel Korschun, associate professor of marketing and Cozen Research Scholar in Marketing.

“She’s working to pull the organization toward things that make sense for them, rather than trying to tackle every social ill,” Korschun says.

Wilson-Scott’s visit to LeBow was arranged by Kyle Weaver, a senior marketing and organizational management major. Weaver’s co-op in Community Impact at Comcast came shortly after Wilson-Scott arrived at the company from JPMorgan Chase in 2016.

“My time on Dalila’s team was nothing short of exceptional,” Weaver says. “I am consistently so inspired by her transformational leadership qualities and her willingness to share her wealth of industry knowledge with anyone who is interested in the [CSR] space – particularly young professionals.”

In the corporate responsibility sphere, Comcast is best known for Comcast Cares Day, an annual day of company-wide service that brings together 115,000 volunteers on 1,200 projects across 23 countries. Wilson-Scott highlighted the rest of the corporation’s activity outside of that one day, noting that the Corporation’s overall charitable spending is even larger than the footprint of the Foundation.

Wilson-Scott made clear that she understands the stakes of large companies’ efforts to make positive impacts in the communities they serve: “There’s a lot of profit being driven, but inequality is still growing in the United States.”

During both her career at JPMorgan Chase, including leading the company’s global philanthropy efforts, and at Comcast, she observes, “What gets a lot of attention is how well the company is doing for its community regardless of what their financial performance is.”

At the same time, she says, in CSR “expectations are a lot higher than they were even 5 years ago. It’s no longer acceptable not to have a footprint.”

For students looking to enter careers in CSR, Wilson-Scott advises that “there’s no set routine”; a recent sampling of her work and travel included a visit to Chicago for a discussion with faith leaders on media and technology and a keynote at a CSR conference at Loyola University, followed by an appearance at South by Southwest for a conversation on diversity in the tech sector.

Wiktoria Brodzinska, a junior majoring in international business and marketing, came away from Wilson-Scott’s visit impressed. “She brought up an interesting perspective of how a lack of internet services and technology can further intensify the equality gaps within our country – something that I had never really considered myself.”