Supporting our local communities is an integral part of our purpose. We do this in all sorts of ways, with a big focus on improving skills and social mobility, and mental health and wellbeing.
Last year, our total community contribution was £6.2m through a combination of donations, in-kind support and over 47,000 volunteering hours. 19% of our people volunteered their time, benefiting some 32,000 people.
Raising aspirations
Our focused work in Bradford, where we opened an office last year, is about integrating business in the community in a way that changes opportunity for young people. It’s part of our commitment to the government’s Opportunity Areas initiative, which seeks to make targeted interventions into 12 of the UK’s lowest performing areas for school achievement and social mobility. As well as creating jobs this year we launched a pilot delivering mental health first aid training for 13 school staff in Bradford in January 2020. The aim is to help staff to better identify and support colleagues who may be struggling with stress related issues.
Our people rose to the challenge of continuing to support our communities during lockdown.
Volunteering and fundraising reimagined
One Firm One Day (OFOD) is our annual, firmwide volunteer and fundraising day. For one day all of our people have the chance to get together to make an impact in their local communities. This year, with the pandemic and social distancing in place we knew that the need for OFOD was greater than ever, but that its format would need to be reimagined.
With this in mind we introduced One Firm Every Day. Our people were able to put aside time to give back over a lengthier period, along with guidance on how to do so safely. You can read about how our people rose to the challenge of supporting our communities, charities, SMEs and schools while working remotely here.
Throughout the year we worked very closely with the 300 members of our PwC Social Entrepreneurs Club. Upskilling continued to be a big focus, as everyone adapted to doing things remotely. You can read more about this, including how our newly launched app helped us connect our people with social entrepreneurs to begin a virtual mentoring relationship here.
We also launched our Employability Skills Toolkit to support young people as well as supporting schools and disadvantaged students virtually through work insight events with partner organisations and charities.
New charity partnerships
Each year our people help raise thousands of pounds through the PwC Foundation for our partner charities, which are chosen in alignment with our community strategy focus areas - social mobility and skills, and mental health and wellbeing. At the end of this year, our people voted for Hospice UK and Crisis as the charities to support over the next three years, succeeding Samaritans and UK Youth. £615k was raised over the three years for our former Foundation charities, equating to over 200,000 beneficiaries. The other two PwC Foundation charities are long standing partners: Beyond Food and Wellbeing of Women.
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