CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR)

SUCCESSFULLY DIFFERENT

Community involvement

Buddy Bear Trust

BDO Northern Ireland’s nominated charity through to June 2011. The Buddy Bear Trust, an independent school which provides Conductive Education for children living with Cerebral Palsy and Motor Disorders.

In May 2010, we launched the “Lifetime of Difference” project which aims to double the number of children that attend the school through raising £100,000 of funds within a twelve month period. With these funds the charity will seek to recruit an additional Conductive Education tutor and provide outreach facilities to children from throughout the Province.

As well as financial support, our people are committed to donating their time and expertise to help build the foundations to create, grow and a sustainable environment within the school for years to come.

General Charitable Activities

Below are a few examples of fundraising projects that our people have been involved in:

Coffee Mornings
Queens 5k Run 2010
Belfast Marathon
North Down Coastal Challenge for the Ulster Hospital
Dress Down Days for Haiti and Children in Need
Christmas Raffles

Involvement in our local community is exceptionally important at BDO. We aim to make a real and sustainable difference to our community in a way that truly reflects our people by drawing on their interests and skills.

We have a community volunteering policy which allows every employee six paid working days per annum to work on community projects and we allow our people to take this time flexibly to suit their own needs and those of the project in which they are involved.
We are members of Business in the Community, an independent business-led charity involving over 800 of the UK’s top companies, all committed to improving the positive impact organisations like ours can have on society.

Caring for the environment

Environmental protection is integral to our position as a responsible business and that is why we have undertaken a number of steps to develop our environmental management system.

Our CSR Charter provides a framework for managing all aspects of our operations on the environment. It helps to set goals towards addressing the environmental issues most relevant to our activities and compliance will ensure that we achieve our commitment towards reducing any negative impact we may have on the environment.
We undertake regular independent environmental audits which allow us to frequently review and measure our carbon footprint and put environmental targets in place to assist in reducing our carbon output.

Our people and the environment

We believe that engaging our people and involving them in shaping our environmental programme is essential in achieving success.

We ask employees to promote an environmentally aware culture and help us to meet the targets we set to improve our environmental performance, in line with our value of Taking Personal Responsibility e.g. reducing paper use, turning off lights, car sharing etc.