RSA celebrates 2021 charitable giving activities

Authored by RSA

The pandemic has been a difficult time for everyone, especially charities who rely on fundraising activities to carry out the work they do to support the community.

At RSA, we are fully committed to being active in our communities. While lockdowns limited everyone’s ability to hold fundraising events and carry out physical volunteering, we wanted to continue to support charities at a critical time.

Despite these challenges, we’re proud to have donated over £1.3 million to charities in the UK over the course of the year, where we launched lots of new initiatives to benefit the communities in which we operate. But this number only tells part of the story. So, we’d like to take this opportunity to delve deeper into all the amazing things our people have done and the difference we’ve made through the initiatives we’ve been working on over the last year.

Supporting a greener future 

Sometimes, when companies pay dividends, they go unclaimed by a small number of shareholders. Despite our best efforts to track those shareholders down, some unclaimed dividends remained. We wanted to put them to good use, so RSA launched a dividend forfeiture programme to distribute these funds to charities, community interest companies (CICs) and community organisations in line with our climate and education goals. 

We were able to grant £295,000 to support 43 grassroots organisations and schools actively working on projects tackling climate change and reducing carbon emissions. One of the beneficiaries, Guildford Living Lab, has used our £10,000 grant to fund their Heat Cool project at the University of Surrey. The Heat Cool project involves educating children in Guildford on the adverse impact of local heat sources, climate change and the importance of control measures via blinds, air conditioning and fans. This vital project helps raise awareness of the impacts of climate change while encouraging people to take steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

We’re pleased that we have been able to distribute the unclaimed dividends, on top of our existing charity grant schemes which we run each year. Through this, we estimate that we’ve been able to support 47,561 people in need.

Tackling the digital divide

The last 12 months have shown how vital access to technology is for education, personal development and keeping in touch with loved ones. But sadly, there is a clear disparity in digital equality amongst children and young people.

So, to help tackle this, we launched a programme where RSA laptops were donated to those in need. With the help of our charity partner, Neighbourly, we have so far donated 1,875 laptops to various good causes.

In addition to this, we also launched a furniture donation programme, where we’ve been able to distribute our surplus office equipment and supplies to charities.

Overall, we’ve donated £557,000 worth of equipment to charities, with our surplus furniture in our offices going to good causes like The East London Business Alliance, YMCA Wearside and Kensington Learning Community Centre.

We hope that these initiatives went some way towards tackling the digital divide in the UK, helping people better access education and their support networks.

Supporting our employees’ charitable efforts

We’d like to thank all of those who helped contribute to these initiatives, and we strive to build on these successes even further in 2022!

Our #RSACommunityHeroes fundraised over £70,000 for charities in 2021. We’re incredibly proud of our employees, who have continued to organise fundraising activities despite the difficulties presented by the pandemic.

We’d like to thank all of those who helped contribute to these initiatives, and we strive to build on these successes even further in 2022!

Thank you for being our #RSACommunityHeroes