Founded in 1953 as the Rexnord Foundation, the Foundation provides grants, scholarships and matching gifts we make to support our three focus areas:
Supporting organizations that deliver essentials like food, shelter, care and clean water to improve quality of life
Supporting organizations that extend equal access to education for everyone and work to create a more diverse and equitable pipeline of employment candidates for Zurn Elkay and other companies
Supporting organizations that work to protect water and other natural resources for current and future generations
In addition to gifts within these focus areas, in 2022 we also continued our support for the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin through our ongoing $1 million grant. This gift provides funding for the hospital’s seven initiatives designed to improve mental and behavioral health for Wisconsin kids:
universal screening for mental health
early childhood mental health
school-based mental and behavioral health
integrated mental and behavioral health
therapist fellowship program
urgent and emergent mental health
partnerships with inpatient and residential care providers
In addition, we support local organizations with direct corporate donations, sponsorships, volunteer time and in-kind products donations where our sustainable products can positively impact our communities. In 2022, we made $2 million in charitable contributions, putting us on track to meet our goal of donating $5 million between 2021 and 2024. Below are some highlights from our 2022 contributions.
In 2022, we continued our second multi-year, $1 million sponsorship of Marquette University’s Bridge to Business for Engineers, a six-day noncredit program for early-career engineers. Attendees receive classroom instruction and participate in applied learning opportunities to build their technical skills and knowledge of business fundamentals. Five Zurn Elkay associates completed the Bridge to Business program in 2022.
In 2022, we sponsored education programs with California Polytechnic State University, North Carolina State University and Penn State University to bring talented engineering students into those schools.
We partnered with the Delta Dental Foundation of Wisconsin to sponsor the Cool Water Program. This program provides grants for schools to replace older drinking fountains with new Elkay water bottle fillers, providing students with a healthier alternative to sugary drinks like juice and soda.
We donated 101 Elkay ezH2O Bottle Filling Stations to city facilities and nonprofit organizations in Chicago through the Elkay Fountains for Youth Program. Launched in 2021, Fountains for Youth helps reduce plastic waste from single-use plastic bottles and makes clean water available to schools, parks facilities, shelters and other locations where children learn, play and live. Our 2022 donations focused on communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides, where longstanding challenges to accessing safe, clean drinking water have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The program installed bottle fillers at libraries, parks, community centers, the Department of Family Support Services, and facilities operated by the Chicago Housing Authority and the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities. Each site also received ongoing donations of filters to ensure the ezH2O Bottle Filling Stations continue to provide clean, safe water for 12 years.
We continued our partnership with 501CThree, a nonprofit that developed a sustainable alternative to delivering singleuse plastic water bottles to communities experiencing a water crisis. 501CThree uses Elkay components to build its WaterBox clean water dispenser, which filters out extreme levels of lead. Since 2021, Elkay has sponsored WaterBox installations in Benton Harbor, Mich., and Jackson, Miss.
We donated 11 Elkay water bottle fillers to United Way, an organization we support annually, in collaboration with fellow Milwaukee-based Badger Meter’s Watering Growing Minds Initiative, which seeks to provide lead-free drinking water for children. United Way identified four local agency partners serving our community’s children that lacked access to safe drinking water, which included:
St. Joseph Academy, Milwaukee
Silver Spring Neighborhood Center, Milwaukee
Penfield Children's Center, Milwaukee
Bay View Community Center, Milwaukee