Ernst & Young>Careers>Corporate responsibility - Ernst & Young - United Kingdom

Corporate responsibility

We approach Corporate Responsibility by coordinating volunteering activities which enlist your unique capabilities, so you can have a far greater impact personally.

We channel our volunteering into three key areas aligned with our business strategy and critical to advancing market economies. These are the three Es of education, entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability.

In our work in education, we help broaden access to education to ensure the next generation has the skills it needs to make a positive contribution to the business world. In our work with entrepreneurs, we support, promote and celebrate start-up companies as they create jobs, opportunity and economic growth. And in our work in environmental sustainability we are exploring different ways of minimising our impact on the environment.

Engaging with the community is also a key element of our global career development framework, EYU. You’ll have the chance to extend your skills in new contexts. This may involve improving your public speaking or sharpening your ability to negotiate and collaborate with people from a variety of backgrounds. Our people are given two days' paid leave for volunteering each year and while many choose to work with groups in their local community, many more work with our key community partners, including education and entrepreneurship initiatives and charities.

At Ernst & Young we’re committed to promoting the business, social and economic progress of every country in which we operate. We believe that by thinking strategically about the societal investments we make today, we’ll ensure there’s a business context in which we can thrive tomorrow.

How are we doing?

It’s all very well talking about corporate responsibility but at Ernst and Young we are in fact making a difference. We have set ourselves some tough targets and we work hard to be monitored and noticed for our success. Here are some of the awards and recognition we have received to date for our UK community investment programme:

Corporate Responsibility Index: Platinum standard
Big Tick: for our Education Partnership programme
Community Mark: Our UK community investment programme has been identified as market-leading by Business in the Community.

But more importantly, what our people have contributed has made a difference. This includes:

Volunteering 29,000 hours;

Over 26% of our people giving some of their time for charity;

Raising over £1 million for charity;

Contributing over £600,000 to charities in matched funding;

Improving the lives of over 30,000 young people;

Counting over £5.5 million of public donations and providing free accounting services worth over £300,000 as the honorary accountant for Comic Relief;

Donating over £200,000 to charity through their payroll in the Give As You Earn scheme;

Contributing the cash equivalent of £4 million (2006/07: £2.7 million) to community investment activities;

Raising £100,000 for The Prince's Trust through our student campus initiative, Profitunity!

Reducing and reusing 90% of our waste.