Sustainability

 

Contributing to communities

Our community investment programme focuses on education and the environment across three areas: supporting and enabling donations to charity; supporting access to education, life skills and entrepreneurship; cultural understanding and encouraging volunteering.

Contributing to communities

Making it easy to donate to charity

As well as our corporate charitable donations, we operate a number of programmes to help our employees and our customers donate to charity.

In 2006, we were the first bank to offer you the facility to donate to charity at our ATM machines.

How to give at an ATM

  1. Select 'donate to charity' option on the menu
  2. Choose from the following charities; Alzheimer's Society, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Macmillan Cancer Support and NSPCC Childline.

In 2011 a total of £598,868 was given to our six national charities, plus to two disaster appeals for the Japan Tsunami and the East Africa Crisis Appeal.

Our six national charities are selected by our employees every two years.

HSBC recognises the value of education - and the life-changing opportunity it brings. Education is also a fundamental building block to driving economic development, helping to create thriving communities.

Prince's Trust

HSBC have pledged to invest £5 Million in The Prince's Trust Fairbridge programme over five years, helping the most vulnerable young people to achieve their potential. This investment makes the bank the largest corporate supporter of The Prince's Trust.

HSBC's investment is focused on helping to transform the scale and delivery of the unique Fairbridge programme. The programme supports those young people who are most marginalised in our communities and in danger of being left behind. A driving focus of the partnership will be on improving the outcomes of the programme and its ability to turn around the lives of those it reaches.

The Fairbridge programme aims to help 13 to 17 year olds who have either been excluded or are in danger of being excluded from school, move back into mainstream education, training and ultimately employment. HSBC will directly fund over 1,800 13-17 year olds through the programme.

HSBC's donation will also fund Development Outreach Workers to inspire communities in the most deprived areas. This intervention is crucial for finding the most marginalised young people who need help. HSBC funded Outreach Development Workers will aim to recruit nearly 3,000 young people onto the programme over five years.

Local projects

We believe it's important to support employees working on local grassroots programmes and projects. Any staff engaged in a local project that supports young people or the environment and which utilises bank volunteers, is able to apply for funding for their chosen charity to help run the project. Past projects have included creating sensory gardens in schools, taking children from inner-city areas to the pantomime and supporting local city farms.

In 2011, 112 local projects were approved for funding, donating a total of £490,996 and involving 2,849 volunteers over 22,520 hours.

All our employees are entitled to one day's paid leave each year to participate in a volunteering activity with a registered charity or community organisation.