Jackson Aims to Lift Families From Poverty to Financial Well-Being

Corporate philanthropy can take myriad forms and directions. At Jackson, “The goal is to provide a pathway and pull families out of generational poverty to financial well-being and economic opportunity,” Danielle Robinson, assistant vice president of corporate philanthropy and executive director of the Jackson Charitable Foundation, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.

One aspect that sets Jackson apart is the critical role that employees play in corporate giving, which spans volunteer work at community organizations and serving on nonprofit boards.

Winner of a 2022 ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES award for Community Impact, Robinson established Jackson’s first corporate responsibility program and by 2017 had launched the Jackson Charity Foundation to advance financial education throughout the country.

Since then, the firm has awarded more than $80 million in grants and matching gifts to nonprofits and has reached more than 10 million students through its financial literacy efforts.

In 2020 and 2021, under Robinson’s leadership, the firm supported more than 300 charities.

She joined Jackson — which markets annuities for individuals and fixed income products for institutional investors — after graduating from Michigan State University in 2006 and immediately began making philanthropic impact in the Lansing, Michigan, community on behalf of Jackson.

She oversees the charitable contributions the company makes there, where its headquarters are located, as well as from the firm’s offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Chicago.

One of her numerous responsibilities (“I literally work from 7 to 7! I’ve always been a high-energy person”) is heading the philanthropic component of the company’s environmental, social and governance efforts, as well as managing Jackson’s annual ESG report.

Robinson leads a six-person team that has formed long-term relationships with nonprofits to advance Jackson’s goal of helping people achieve “financial freedom for life,” as she frames it.

The company has contributed $750,000 — a combination of corporate gifts and employee contributions — to underwrite the Jackson Volunteer Center at Greater Lansing Food Bank’s new expanded facility. It will allow the organization to distribute a planned 18 million meals in 2025.

ThinkAdvisor recently held a phone interview with Robinson, who was speaking from Lansing.

Words to live by for this high-energy executive are: “Look around the company for needs and see if you can help to solve them,” she says, adding, “It’s brought me lots of opportunity.”

Here are highlights of our interview:

THINKADVISOR: What’s the objective of Jackson’s philanthropic program?

DANIELLE ROBINSON: Overall, the idea is to find a way to be connected to the community, contribute to it and help it become successful.

Our approach to giving is geared to having meaningful, long-term relationships with nonprofits that build the foundation for helping people achieve financial freedom for life.

What distinguishes Jackson’s program?

A differentiator is that our associates [aka all employees] play a critical role in Jackson’s philanthropy. They’re at the heart of helping us on our grants review committee, making recommendations for funding [and so on].

[Eighty-one of] our associates serve on nonprofit boards [mainly in Lansing, Chicago and Nashville].

And our associates volunteer regularly at organizations. Their time there helps multiply the impact of our philanthropy dollars.

What are Jackson’s giving priorities?

They focus on what it takes to build a strong family, to help families strengthen and stabilize and also to provide funding for economic opportunities — like job-skills training, financial education, coaching and even wealth-building, like homeownership programs.

The goal is to provide a pathway and pull families out of generational poverty to financial well-being and economic opportunity.

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Jackson did something unusual to help address food insecurity across the country. Please explain.

The dining center kitchen in our Nashville office was available, but the staff had no one to cook for because all employees were working from home.

Nashville Food Project, a nonprofit, was, because of social distancing, in need of more kitchen space to create food kits they were sending to students.

So we loaned out our kitchen and kitchen staff and did about 4,500 box lunches for students during that summer.

Great! What did Jackson do amid the pandemic that directly addressed the company’s business?

Our sales team all over the country was limited from meeting in person with the financial advisors they would normally meet with.