Our work with the community

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion extends to our community work, where we focus on giving back through education and mentorship through three unique pathways.

Our belief

Education and access are the cornerstones of a solid foundation and key to achieving professional and personal success.

Our goal

Help students in our local communities gain a quality education and access to investment management career opportunities not typically afforded to them.

One goal, three pathways

In addition to matching employees’ contributions to the charities of their choice, on a firm level, we have formed a sponsorship program with SEEDS – Access Changes Everything, a local, nonprofit organization founded in 1992 that prepares motivated, high-achieving, low-income students for admission to private schools and colleges across the country. Approximately 350 students will be served by SEEDS academic programs this year, with more than 550 additional students receiving further support through SEEDS Guidance department. An additional 1,900 alumni are continuing their educations in college or graduate school or are in the workforce. Find out more about the impressive work of this organization here.

We are excited to be working with Passaic High School students within their Pathways Program. Passaic High School, an NAF Finance Academy school, offers their Pathway students, in selected areas of specialty (Finance, Business, Graphic Design, Computer Science, and more) access to advanced college-level classes to prepare them for either their next step of education or participation in the workforce. The unique specialty areas provides students with field experiences and job shadowing opportunities as part of the high school curriculum and the ability to earn college-level credits.

Systematic serves on the programs Advisory Board to help set objectives of the program and curriculum standards. Other opportunities for us to work directly with the students include a job shadowing day, hosting career seminar presentations, and assistance with mock interviews or essay writing for college applications, to name a few. We also continue to seek special work-based learning projects of interest that could be joined by some students. In fact, some of our mentees participated in helping to build this website!

Our summer internship program emphasizes the advancement of diversity within the investment management industry. The program provides an intensive, hands-on, ten-week exposure to our firm and industry, as well as mentorship opportunities with professionals from across our entire organization. Over the past year we have expanded our program from hosting a student within our investment team to include candidates within other areas of the firm such as marketing and investment operations. Students from local colleges are selected based on educational merit and professional interests.