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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. We are currently supporting the British Science Association as our firmwide charity as well as The Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal and Save the Children Emergency Fund. We also have a local charity for each office which has been chosen by our people.
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 are also 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 also 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 and victims of the Ukraine War.
Firmwide Charities
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British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal |
We work with The British Science Association (BSA) as our main firmwide charity. We have made donated £88,000 to them 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 now be a national sponsor of the CREST Awards. More details about our relationship can be found in our blog post. We also donated £30,000 to Save the Children and £45,000 to The British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal in 2022 as felt a focus on these emergencies was the right thing to do.
Local Office Charities
Our people have also chosen the charities they support at a local, office level. Each office got together to talk about what was important to them and created a short list of charities they wanted to support. One charity was then chosen by an office vote and this is the charity the office we currently support. Each charity has received £45,000 over the course of two years.
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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 and Ukraine. For Coronavirus we donated £2,500 to each of the following charities:
We have all watched the harrowing scenes coming from Afghanistan with shock and disbelief as the situation has unfolded. We believe that we cannot stand by and we must do something to help in some way. Mewburn Ellis has donated £10,000 from our Forward Community Charity Fund to The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Afghanistan Appeal.
The UNHCR teams remain on the ground in Afghanistan where it is safe to do so to help fleeing Afghans with emergency shelter, food, health, water and sanitation support and cash assistance. This help includes the distribution of family tents, hygiene kits and core relief items like blankets, sleeping mats and kitchen sets. We hope that our donation can make a small difference.
We chose the UNHCR because their focus is on practical help now for whoever needs it, but they also look longer term on how people can be resettled and lives rebuilt. They are also active political advocates at a global level. For example UNHCR is advocating for the international community to support both Afghanistan and also neighbouring countries, Pakistan and Iran, which are already hosting over 2 million Afghan refugees.
Inclusion & Diversity Charities
We have also made donations of between £5-10K to each of the following charities in support of the overall aims of our community programme with a focus on diversity, inclusion and sustainability:
Environmental & Animal Charities
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The Climate |
Marine |
Support Dogs | StreetVet |
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is important to us. The success of our business relies upon our ability to attract, train and retain the best people. We support diversity throughout our business and make every effort to create and maintain an inclusive culture. We recognise our responsibilities in the community and encourage our people to engage in activities that better society and build trust in our local communities. As a forward-looking firm, we understand the importance of minimising our environmental impact. Therefore we are committed to facilitating environmentally friendly working practices by our people and in our offices.
The concept of CSR is in our opinion under developed in our profession. We don’t want to just do what is required like many other firms - but go above and beyond. We have built our business over 150 years by looking ahead and adapting and changing at the right times. Thinking about the future of our planet and society, being a good corporate citizen and doing our bit to make a difference is a high priority for the firm. Our recent rebrand was to capture what we believe is at the very heart of our firm – being forward-looking. To be a truly forward-looking firm, community must be at the very heart of our culture. We are at the beginning of an exciting journey to develop what we believe will be a vital community programme to deliver our CSR initiatives. Our Forward Community Programme covers the following key areas:
Inclusivity
Making sure that equality and diversity are celebrated. We want a firm that has diversity of thought, ideas and viewpoints and where all our people, regardless of their background, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability or sexual orientation feel they belong. Inclusion and diversity is high on the agenda for Mewburn Ellis. It’s part of our business plan and is being driven by our management board. For us, inclusion and diversity is more than just a tick-box exercise – it is an issue that’s long been on our agenda and ingrained in our business plan and imbedded in our culture.
We've come a long way in this important area. We have undertaken an audit of our existing culture, processes and practices to help us develop a strategic I&D framework that explores four key areas. Inclusivity for us is about the people we hire, the careers we nurture, the culture we build and the relationships we have with our clients. We have already started to make changes in these areas. We have created a new board level role of Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer as well as launched an Inclusion & Diversity Collaboration Group. We have rolled out training to all our leaders, signed up to the IP Inclusive Senior Leader's Pledge and are also now proud to be using Rare Recruitment's Contextual Recruitment System (CRS) which allows us to consider an applicant's achievements in the context in which they were gained.
Community
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.
This year we have chosen to support Coronavirus related charities at a firmwide level and our people have chosen a local charity for each office. We have also given all our people 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 amounts to more than £150,000 of investment and over 300 days of time donated to good causes. Find out more below about our plans for charitable giving of both time and money.
Sustainability
We believe we must play our part in reducing the use of energy, lowering carbon emissions and reducing waste. We are in the process of completely redeveloping our approach to facilities management and bringing in new resources to look after the environmental areas of our Forward Community Programme and drive this area forward. We currently operate a paperless office and have done so for over a decade. We recycle of course, including our end of life electronics and have recently switched to cloud computing.
We try to be sustainable in our overall approach to our business and make sure the little things are considered, such as glass milk bottles rather than plastic and the ability to recycle any materials we produce. We have also recently reviewed the sustainability of our meeting rooms and as well as recycling our coffee capsules, our tea bags are biodegradable and our biscuits are organic and baked using renewable energy.
We try not to print unless we have to and when we do we consider the paper we use, it's sustainability and whether it can be recycled. For example our business cards are printed on a new kind of paper made from 100% recycled T-shirts offcuts - the stuff that normally gets thrown away. Our magazine is printed on PEFC accredited paper, this means it is has been sourced from sustainably managed forests, which adhere to environmentally approved standards. This paper has less carbon footprint than recycled paper. The magazine can also be recycled and the polywrap it is sent out in is made from bio compostable material.
We have moved to two new offices in the last 18 months with excellent sustainability credentials which was a high priority in our choice. We are currently developing a more sustainable travel policy to encourage the reduction of air travel and actively encourage train and bike use. We have also just launched a new, upgraded VC system into the firm to reduce travel. We have many other plans, including looking at how we can further reduce and offset our carbon emissions.
We believe that businesses are defined by how well they handled themselves during this challenging time. Like many others we had to make tough decisions and work together to evolve how we operate and manage our work and people.
We believe we did this well and feedback from our people and our clients reinforces this. But beyond our own firm we wanted to contribute and do our bit for the larger community. Many of our people were helping in their own ways from raising money to volunteering and even 3D printing masks at home. We fully supported this and each of our team have a day they could use to support a cause of their choice.
In addition to this we redirected some of our firmwide charity budget to support Coronavirus related campaigns. We chose a broad spread as we felt there were many areas that really need help.
We chose to support the following charities with donations and we also matched any donations our people make to these causes:
Richard Clegg - Managing Partner
Managing Partner, European Patent Attorney
Head of HR
Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer
Chief Financial & Operating Officer
Mewburn Ellis Forward is a biannual publication that celebrates the best of innovation and exploration. We run regular columns in the magazine on inclusivity and many of our articles have a focus on sustainability.
Our magazine is printed on paper that has been sourced from sustainably managed forests which adhere to environmentally approved standards. This paper has less carbon footprint than recycled paper. The full magazine, including the cover, can be recycled and the wrapper that is used to protect the magazine is made from starch-based biopolymers, meaning it is compostable.
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