Our direct community investment amounted to
£13.6M(*)
compared with £7.3 million in 2021.(2)
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Giving and volunteering
A thriving economy depends on thriving communities. As a leading financial firm in the UK, we believe we can make a real and positive difference to people’s lives.
- (*) Within the scope of EY assurance
- This includes the funding we make available to support colleague giving and the direct costs of delivering our community programmes.
Please see our 2022 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Disclosures Report (PDF 9.6MB) for more information.
Giving back to communities
We’re committed to supporting and giving back to the communities we operate in. Our direct community investment in 2022 amounted to £13.6 million(*) compared with £7.3 million in 2021, as measured using the Business for Societal Impact benchmarking standard. This includes the funding we make available to support colleague giving and the direct costs of delivering our community programmes.
(*) Within the scope of EY assurance.
Colleague charitable giving
In 2022, we continued to promote our Do Good Feel Good campaign to give our colleagues opportunities to support the good causes they care about through volunteering and fundraising. Our colleagues donated and fundraised over £3.8 million for good causes and volunteered over 76,000 worktime hours, providing their skills and expertise to support our communities. Our popular challenge events in September 2022 offered colleagues across the UK free access to fundraising events which included walking, running, bungee and abseiling. In addition to this we matched all colleague fundraising throughout the month of September. Through this campaign, our colleagues raised over £580,000 for charitable causes. Our 2021 Do Good Feel Good challenge events won Best Scheme to Encourage Staff Fundraising at The Better Society Awards in May 2022.
To celebrate Giving Tuesday, a global day of giving, we donated £200,000 to the charities our colleagues support through payroll giving, incentivising them to sign up to the programme or increase their donation. In recognition of the cost of living crisis, we held three auctions for rare and collectable banknotes, with the proceeds donated to Trussell Trust whose service demands for their foodbanks increased significantly across the UK.
Support for disasters and emergencies
Across 2022, our colleagues and customers donated to three appeals launched by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). These appeals supported the humanitarian relief efforts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Pakistan, and led to over £12 million being donated to DEC, which includes £2.7 million donations from NatWest Group. DEC and NatWest Group were shortlisted for two awards at the 2022 Corporate Engagement Awards, winning Most Effective One off Campaign for the DEC Ukraine Appeal and a Silver Award for Most Innovative Collaboration.
For more information on giving and volunteering, see pages 48-49 of our 2022 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Disclosures Report (PDF 9.6MB).