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"O2's funding of the internet café has shown they are keen to listen to the local community and local police in order to help young people." Mike Mullins, Centre Manager, The Haymill Centre, United Kingdom |
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Charitable Donations | Sponsorship | Volunteering | Research and measurement Community involvement and investment is a vital part of our approach to corporate responsibility. We believe we have a positive role to play in the development of communities and can help to tackle real social needs. At the same time we know that such projects, if developed carefully and carried through with real energy and commitment, can bring benefits to mmO2. These include protecting and enhancing our reputation with key stakeholders, helping to motivate and retain good employees, improving community relations where we work and making mmO2 a more secure and successful business for the long-term. Community investment activity is going on throughout the Group and in each of the markets we operate in. Our approach is guided by a Group-wide strategic framework and a set of objectives, but the individual business units have the necessary freedom to decide the projects they support and the level of investment they want to make. The main focus of our community investment work is the "Can Do in the Community" programme launched in December 2002 and which is funded to the tune of over £1 million a year. The objective is to support sustainable projects that bring tangible and enduring benefits to the communities we serve. We particularly look to support initiatives where mobile or other advanced technologies can be used to tackle social needs and where our own employees can become directly involved. A prime example of our new Can Do in the Community programme is the trial of a new asthma monitoring solution in the Thames Valley region of the UK, details of which are included in the "What mobile can do" section of this report. This important project for which we are providing funding, technical support, xda devices - combined mobile phones and computers - and network capacity, is already showing some exciting benefits in the treatment and care of asthma sufferers. Most notably, children are now recording their breathing more accurately using the electronic peak flow meter attached to the xda. While Can Do in the Community is the main focus of our community investment our overall community efforts take several different forms including targeted charitable donations, sponsorship of community projects, direct involvement by O2 employees, fundraising and community volunteering. In the UK and Ireland we operate Give as You Earn schemes and we have launched a Match Funding scheme across the Group to help support employees in their fundraising for charitable and voluntary organisations. |
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Charitable donations Each year we select an area to target for charitable donations. The Group selects a specific charity it wants to support each year and some of the operating businesses do the same based on their overall operating circumstances. In 2003/04 our chosen Group theme is helping young people overcome disadvantage, escape crime and gain access to better educational opportunities. Following voting across the Group, employees selected as its Charity of the Year for 2003/04 the International Youth Foundation, a charity working to improve the conditions and prospects for children and young people, often through educational programmes aimed at giving them a better chance in life. Projects addressing this area are being delivered this year across the countries we operate in. During the year ended 31 March 2003, the Group made donations to charitable and community organisations totalling £444,000. It is estimated that donations through our community sponsorship schemes and in-kind contributions totalled almost £1.8 million. Education and employment related projects accounted for 27 per cent and 22 per cent respectively of this amount. We are currently reviewing the way we measure the in-kind contributions we make and will be reporting in the current year on our progress with this. Last year's donations included contributions to charities across Europe selected through a Group-wide competition. The competition took the form of a corporate responsibility quiz and was designed to mark our first anniversary and to raise awareness among employees about corporate responsibility and our community investment programme. The winners in each business nominated a charity to receive £5,000 (7,800 Euros). Chosen charities were Aktion Mensch, a German charity supporting people with disabilities and chronic illness; Crossroads Isle of Man, which supports the carers of people who are disabled, elderly or chronically ill; Stichting Weeskinderen, a Dutch organisation supporting three orphanages in Kenya; the NSPCC's full stop campaign; and two small animal welfare charities in the North East of England and in Ireland. |
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Sponsorship schemes We sponsor both charitable and non-charitable schemes focusing on projects that offer sustainable improvements to people's lives and that enhance learning, education and self-development. We are particularly keen to participate in projects where our mobile services can be used to address social need and that offer a chance for our employees to become involved in the communities we work in. Slough, the home of the mmO2 headquarters and O2 UK, is currently the focus of a number of exciting projects. Following our donation of specially equipped bicycles to the local police to help improve community policing, we have now extended our involvement in work to tackle youth crime. Following a spate of attacks on our employees as they travelled to and from work, we consulted with the local authority and voluntary organisations and decided to focus on the prevention of crime among young people excluded or at risk from exclusion from school. We have equipped an internet café in a local community centre close to O2 offices. The café - which includes 12 broadband internet PCs, printers, a plasma screen and a video/DVD recorder - is open to young people enrolled in the local authority's pupil referral unit or involved in the local Youth and Play Team. Many have an involvement in crime and the idea is to discourage criminal behaviour, offer them access to digital technology to support their education and eventually to provide training and employment opportunities. The facility was handed over by our Chairman, David Varney, on March 17, 2003, and we hope in future to involve employees in mentoring and supporting young people using the centre. In Ireland our community work is particularly focused on working with disadvantaged young people, reflecting the fact that 38 per cent of the Irish population is under the age of 25 and that many are growing up in areas of social deprivation. We aim to offer young people access to wider education opportunities and self-development projects. We are active supporters of Common Purpose, a not-for-profit organisation which runs a variety of leadership programmes to raise awareness of the responsibility each of us has to society. A number of employees in Ireland have participated in Junior Achievement Ireland programmes that aim to build partnerships between the business community and education sector. O2 Ireland has embraced community investment enthusiastically and plans are in place to increase our activities in this area. O2 Germany is concentrating its sponsorship work on education and culture. The business is a sponsor of the new Pinakothek der Moderne art museum in Munich. It also sponsors a professorship at Munich's Technology University and intends to partake in a number of technology studies there. Manx Telecom has also devoted much of its community investment in the education sector with projects like the telecomputer bus, a travelling communications suite which tours local primary schools to support technology classes and special topic work. In a recent first in Europe, the 20 computers on the bus were linked to the internet via one 3G mobile phone giving children access to wireless broadband internet rather than the slower ISDN connection they normally use.  |
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Community volunteering Not all of our community projects are based in local markets. In early 2003 our recently sold business, O2 Netherlands led a project to help build houses for needy families in the Konongo region of Ghana. The project involved 42 volunteers from across the Group travelling to Ghana for a week to work with Habitat for Humanity, a charity providing housing in some of the world's most deprived regions. The team worked on a block of seven houses over the course of the week and also got involved in other community activities while there. Ahead of the trip, we debated whether it would be a better use of resources to provide only funding for the project. We decided it was important to give O2 employees the chance to volunteer as well as this would help to create a culture of volunteering within the Company. The project gave us a unique opportunity to demonstrate at Group level our determination to be actively involved on the ground in community investment projects. The Leeds Cares scheme - part of a Business in the Community UK initiative to broker co-operation between companies and local voluntary organisations and projects - is now well established and provides a range of opportunities for our employees to do volunteering work, for instance in schools and old people's homes. Thanks to the success and popularity of this scheme, we have recently become involved in Manchester Cares. Employees are also actively involved in schools that we support in Slough and Bury. Employees at the Limerick call centre in Ireland have been actively involved for many years in supporting children who are suffering due to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe. Numerous other community activities take place at the call centre every year. |
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Research and measuring success We are determined to make our community investment programme effective and genuinely useful. We are at an early stage in the majority of our projects and intend to put in place ways of measuring outcomes to ensure these are carefully assessed. During the year we were informed through, among other things, research carried out by MORI that surveyed people's attitudes towards corporate responsibility and mobile phone operators. This study helped us to define the scope and direction of our Can Do in the Community programme. To follow this up we plan to carry out some research on whether our community investments have improved the perception of the Company as a good community neighbour. |
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| Life saving What mobile can do >> |
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| PDF: THE REPORT > |
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