Community Giving: Over £750,000 donated to charity since 2020.

Community is important to Mewburn Ellis. For us this means nurturing our people, helping everyone develop and contributing to the wider communities in which we operate, as well as supporting worthy causes with time and money. We donate 1% of our profits to charity each year through our Forward Community Programme Charity Fund. Everyone that works at Mewburn Ellis has one community day per year to support causes they care about and we operate a Give As You Earn (GAYE) scheme, so our people can donate to charities of their choice in a simple and tax effective way. Our combined community effort has amounted to more than £750,000 of investment since 2020.

We have a Community Champion that leads our activity and a group of people within the firm that support our community initiatives. Their role is to feed thoughts and ideas into the process and work closely with our chosen charities.

We support causes that are:

• Relevant to our business and the sectors and technical areas on which we focus
• Helping to get more people into IP and remove barriers to entry to our profession
• Important to our staff, enable them to use their community day where possible
• Support the local communities where our offices are based
• In line with our inclusion and diversity goals and values
• Focussing on the environment and tackling the climate crisis
• Emergency situations where we believe providing urgent help is the right thing to do

Mewburn Ellis support the Sustainable Development Goals. Our community work delivers against ten of the seventeen goals.

Find out more about why community is so important to our firm

Charities we support:

Firmwide Charities

We work with The British Science Association (BSA) as our main firmwide charity on an ongoing basis. We have donated £128,000 over the last three years to help young people, no matter what their background, get into science. The BSA’s mission is to transform the diversity and inclusivity of science; to reach under-served audiences; and to increase the number of people who are actively engaged and involved in science. We are proud to be a national sponsor of their CREST Awards. More details about our relationship can be found in our blog post and our CREST Awards partnership project report outlines some of the amazing work that our funding has achieved.

Additional Firmwide Charities for 2022-23

• We donated £30,000 to Save the Children Ukraine Appeal and £45,000 to the The British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal
• We also donated £5,000 to the Red Cross Turkey Appeal
  
• We donated £4,350 to the Better Kitchen Sink Project to pay for the tooling, cavity mold, and samples for testing the sink element of their new water filter. This innovative new sink will help reduce the amount of time needed to collect water and enable those children typically tasked with this work to go to school. 
  
  

Additional Firmwide Charities for 2023-24

• We have donated £20,000 to UK based charity FoodCycle. Their vision is to make food poverty, loneliness and food waste a thing of the past for every community. They connect communities, reduce loneliness and food poverty – working with thousands of volunteers and surplus food to help everyone who needs them.
• We also supported German based food bank Die Tafel. Out £5,000 donation will help this charity to collect food from retailers and manufacturing companies and distribute it to people affected by poverty.
  

Local Office Charities

Our people choose the charities they support at a local, office level. Each office creates a short list of charities they want to support for a two year period. One charity is then chosen by each office vote and we support that charity with £30,000 to each over two years. We also try where possible to help out and use our volunteering days to support these charities. For our 2020 choices we chose to support the charities for three years as Covid stopped a lot of activity we would have otherwise undertaken. 

Choices for 2023 to 2025

London chose the National Brain Appeal. A charity that raises funds for Queen Square,  one of the world’s leading centres for the diagnosis, treatment and care of patients with neurological and neuromuscular conditions including stroke, multiple sclerosis, brain cancer, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia.

Bristol chose the Springboard Opportunity Group. This charity provides families in Bristol with children with additional needs and disabilities the opportunity to learn and develop. 

Manchester chose the Booth Centre - a homeless charity based in Manchester city centre. Their work is able to directly benefit the homeless people that our staff see on the streets when making their way into the office. 

Cambridge chose the Cambridge City Foodbank. Cambridge is one of the highest cost of living cities  in the UK with extremely high socioeconomic disparity. The foodbank provide three days’ nutritionally balanced emergency food and support to local people who are referred to them in crisis. 

Munich chose Die Arche, a children's charity committed to improving the living conditions of disadvantaged children and families in Germany. 

Choices for 2020 to 2023

Bristol: Help Bristol Homeless a charity that supports homeless and raising awareness of homelessness in Bristol by providing a gated community of 15 self contained flats.

Cambridge: East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices, which cares for children and young people with life-threatening conditions across Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, and supports their families.

London: Shelter from the Storm, an emergency night shelter located not far from our London office, providing bed, dinner and breakfast for 38 homeless people every night of the year.

Manchester: The Christie Charitable Fund, a Manchester based hospital, which provides cancer care, research and education.

Munich: KARLA 51 Women’s Shelter, a Munich based, women only shelter supporting women and children and providing beds for 55 women each night.

Inclusion & Diversity Charities

We have also made donations of between £5-25K to each of the following charities in support of the overall aims of our community programme with a focus on diversity, inclusion and sustainability: These charities have been nominated by our I&D Collaboration Group.

Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation		Prince's Trust	Scope
Greggs Foundation			Speakers for Schools

WoMEn of Mewburn Ellis Network Charities

As part of our commitment to women at the firm we also allocate community funds to specifically support women's charities.  These charities are nominated and voted for by our women’s group the WoMEn of Mewburn Ellis Network. Each charity has received a donation of between £3,000-£5,000.

Environmental & Animal Charities

We're passionate about the environment and making a difference in this important area. Charity is an important part of this. We're delighted to be supporting Support Dogs this year by sponsoring a puppy through it's training. It costs £20,000 to train a life changing support dog partnership and we're delighted to have been able to do this.