Community: Supporting with time & money

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. As a firm we have made a commitment to donate 1% of our profits to charity as well as over 300 days of time to good causes. We support charities at a firmwide and local office level and do this through our Forward Community Programme Charity Fund. 

Everyone that works at Mewburn Ellis has one community day per year to enable them to support causes they care about. In addition 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 £600,000 of investment since 2020.

This is in addition to our more ad hoc fund raising activity, where we have supported charities and events such as Genes for Jeans, Children in Need and Save the Children. We have also been an active supporter of UK Youth, a leading national charity, committed to providing access to appropriate, high quality services in every community so that young people are empowered to build bright futures, regardless of their background or circumstances.

We donate all of our old desktop PCs to the charity PCrefurb an independent not-for-profit community group with the aim of engaging the IT skills of vulnerable and hard-to-reach individuals to “rescue” unwanted IT equipment. They refurbish donated IT equipment and redistribute it to those most in need, helping people connect with training and education and to support their well-being.  So far we have donated 58 desktops and 16 monitors with more to come.  Our commitment to supporting the work that PCrefurb do means that many more vulnerable people will be helped to get online.

We also make donations in emergency situations and in the past two years have donated to Coronavirus related charities to cover appeals for help in a range of areas as well as fund to support on the ground in Afghanistan, victims of the Ukraine War and the Turkey Earthquake Appeal.

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

Charities we support:

Firmwide Charities

British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal

We work with The British Science Association (BSA) as our main firmwide charity. 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 over the past two years. We also donated £30,000 to Save the Children and £45,000 to The British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal in 2022 as well as £5,000 to the Red Cross Turkey Appeal as we felt a focus on these emergencies was the right thing to do. 

Local Office Charities

Our people also 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 an office vote and we support with £30,000 to each charity over two years.

2023-25

• 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. 

2020-23

• 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.

Emergency Charity Donations

We believe that businesses are defined by how well they handle themselves during challenging times and as part of this we use our fund to make emergency charitable donations where we think we have to act. So far we have supported Coronavirus related campaigns, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Turkey. For Coronavirus we donated £2,500 to each of the following charities:

• The National Emergencies Trust
• Age UK Coronavirus Appeal
• The Trussell Trust
• NHS Charities Together

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:

Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation

Prince's Trust

Scope

Greggs Foundation

Mind Out

Speakers for Schools

Environmental & Animal Charities

The Climate Coalition

Marine Conservation Society

Support Dogs

StreetVet