Community engagement has been gaining importance in consumers’ values. According to Euromonitor’s Lifestyles survey fielded in 2021, 48.5% of global respondents agreed that being active in the community is important to them.
Our annual Community Week is all about learning more about the organisations which we support through our Corporate Social Responsibility programme. It also encourages a focus on community engagement such as volunteering, fundraising and collecting clothing and food for charity. It was great to see during our recent Community Week that some employees in our 15 offices worldwide were able not just to volunteer from home or office, but also to be out and about in their local communities again: in Sydney, staff helped out clearing and weeding through the Bushcare Program at Woollahra; in Dubai, a group of around 15 staff planted an area with native Ghaf trees with Goumbook.
This year our annual pledge to give 1% of turnover to our charity programme means we will have spent over £1.5million on over 70 different charities worldwide. We are proud to be supporting so many organisations which have been struggling as a result of COVID.
Bees for Development: A new Headline Partner
We are delighted to be announcing that Bees for Development is our new Headline Partner. This is a small organisation which operates in different parts of the world using local skills and traditions to promote beekeeping as a way out of poverty. We will be supporting a project in Ethiopia to train 50 new families to keep beehives. These families own no land and have limited means of earning a living.
Headline Partners: who are they and what do they do?
Euromonitor now has ten Headline Partners, many of which we have supported for a number of years through our CSR programme.
What is a Headline Partner?
Nearly all our Headline Partners work internationally. Some have three-year funding agreements to allow them to plan ahead effectively. All are registered charities and apolitical and non-religious. Headline Partners are given significantly higher donations that our many Regional Partners which are local to our 15 offices.
How are they chosen?
All our charity partners, headline and regional, are nominated by our employees. We have a strict due diligence process and only partner with charities that have no political or religious links.
What projects do we support?
A number of our partners are small organisations where our donations can make a big difference. Projects supported tend to be those which they find hard to fund from other sources, or we might give unrestricted funding to enable them to spend where there is greatest need. The charities we work with all use local partners to do the work in the field. This year many have been instrumental in the fight against Covid in the communities in which they operate.
Our Headline Partners deliberately cover a broad range of sectors and geographies, covering the UN Sustainable Development Goals:
• Micro rainbow International supports the LGBTQIA+ community. Our project is in Brazil, helping this community set up businesses to avoid workplace discrimination.
• Justice and Care fights against human trafficking and modern slavery. We are supporting them to stop this at source in Romania.
• Place2Be, our only UK charity partner, provides mental health support in British schools.
• Humanity and Inclusion works with disability and rehabilitation. We are supporting an accessible education scheme in Burkina Faso to allow disabled children into school.
• Walkabout Foundation provides adapted wheelchairs to communities. We work with them in Northern Uganda, and support a rehabilitation service and wheelchair workshop employing disabled people in Kenya.
• Just a Drop provides water supplies, latrines and hygiene education. We are supporting projects in Nicaragua and India);
• Jaya Mental Health trains nursing staff in Nepal to deal with mental health and supports remote community clinics.
• Médecins sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders provides emergency medical support around the world in crisis situations. We give core funding to them to spend wherever the need is greatest.
• World Bicycle Relief provides bicycles to children, especially girls, to enable them to travel to school safely. This year we have given bicycles to schools in Zimbabwe and Kenya.
Learn more about our CSR programme.