Working in our Communities.

Putting our employees’ skills, expertise and experience to good use in the outside world can benefit both the individual and external organisations. Legal & General offers opportunities for individuals and teams and provides ring-fenced funding to support this.

The third sector (charities, social enterprises and community interest companies) is an important sector to society. It is the sector, which typically uncovers and addresses society’s emerging needs and fills those gaps with enthusiastic people who drive change and improvement through their activity.

We believe that one of our roles, as a business is to support this sector through financial input, our employees’ expertise or financial management through our products. We also believe that this sector provides us with important insight, enabling us to learn more about potential external impacts on our businesses.

In supporting the third sector we aim to:

• Assisting developing new ways to raise funds and attract donors particularly through social media.
• Increase awareness of the value of the Third Sector’s expertise in solving social issues that are relevant to our savings, risk and investment management businesses whilst at the same time learning from those organisations and making better decisions internally as a result.
• Be a consistent financial supporter of the Third Sector, contributing at least £2.5m a year.
• Deliver employees a New Psychological contract. Encourage and enable employee involvement. We realise that some of our employees appreciate these opportunities alongside their usual financial package. Our CSR programmes play a key role in providing additional experiences at Legal & General.

What we have delivered in 2010

Highlights for 2010 include:

• Our UK employees volunteered over 894 days or 6,705 working hours to charities and community groups. This means that 13% of our UK staff were involved in volunteership in 2010.
• Research and Development – In 2010 we invested over £550,000 in Groupwide projects, helping us to make better informed decisions in line with our Groupwide campaigns. You will see clear evidence of this in our campaign sections.
• Overall £3.8m has been invested in the Third/Not for Profit Sector in 2010 which is the highest level of investment for three years across our business. You can see how we have invested our money here.
• The 2010 Making a Difference Awards for Employees were held by the Chairman John Stewart. We received a record number of votes. Over 2,000 employees voted an increase of 100% from last year.

The winners and their video stories can be found here.

• Charity Champions – Mohani Seaman has made it her personal mission to raise money for Children with Cancer. She has raised awareness of the charity and is relentless in her campaign.
• Finalists – James Ennis, Dawn Watkins and Sue Wilson, Jane Lyle and Karen Sherville.
• Office Angels – Emma Churchward changed the process for cancelling term on term policies, which caused complaints because we weren′t keeping our customers informed of pending premium refunds.
• Finalists – Dafydd Vaile and Weronika Kazmierczak.
• Community Spirit. – Alex Nicholson regularly helps children with disabilities learn to swim. He spends a lot of his time raising large amounts of money for various charities he supports.
• Finalists – John Redmond and Kim Youpa.
• Education in the Community. – Kirsten James used her own holiday to help in a school in Sri Lanka affected by the Tsunami and living in poverty.
• Finalists – Natalia Koloneva and Stella Round.

A special team award was given to "The Annuities Charity Committee", Cardiff for the passion and determination shown to raise funds for charity.

This year we also recognised charity champions who have engaged and supported charities on an ongoing basis.

• Matt Hotson, Investor Relations and Strategy Director – Matt is a trustee for The Nightline Charity, which offers emotional support to students whilst at university.
• Stephen Smith, Housing and External Affairs Director – Stephen has championed Shelter’s campaigns across Legal & General and the mortgage industry.
• Adrian Clark, Chief Operations Officer – Adrian has raised the profile of CSR within Cardiff bringing a distinct improvement in CSR at the location, while fundraising for various charities.
• Anita Howe, Head of Housing Marketing – Anita was involved in bringing both Shelter and The Children′s Trust into the Legal & General CSR programme.
• Mary Sinclair Porter, Relationship and Operations Manager - Mary is an active committee member of the Hijinx Theatre, Cardiff, particularly the Odyssey Theatre project which includes people with learning disabilities.
• Tom Mabbort – IFA Operations Manager Kingswood, Tom is at the core of this community spending a good proportion of his personal time supporting the church and community.