Community

Our aim is to be a good neighbour in the communities in which we operate and our UK businesses work with communities to address specific local needs which are beneficial to the community and provide our people with personal development opportunities.

Hearts in Action

Hearts in Action is AXA’s global community partnership programme which provides volunteer and charity fundraising opportunities for employees and is designed to build links between our business, our people and our local communities. It acts as a guideline for community involvement but allows local offices to develop programmes that are suitable for their employees and local community needs. With over 11,000 employees working across 35 sites in the UK, we have a huge range of local community and charity projects taking place each year. In 2008, 5,173 of our people in the UK volunteered through Hearts in Action, dedicating over 45,000 hours of volunteer time. In 2009 we joined the London Benchmarking Group to start measuring our community investment activity, be it volunteering, sponsorship, or donations, in line with a recognised standard that is used by hundreds of businesses around the world.

We have many partnership projects with schools throughout the UK. For example, we support four primary schools in Bristol and Coventry by providing employee volunteers who give children one-to-one reading support. Governors support school staff and help schools to provide the best possible standards of education and we have over 30 AXA school governor volunteers supporting schools in Bristol and Coventry.

Employee fundraising and donations

In addition to a multitude of local and employee-specific fundraising efforts, we support national campaigns with employee fundraising and in-kind donations. Children in Need is a high profile fundraising campaign and we run fundraising days and use our call centres as pledge lines for the public to make donations. In 2008, employees at the AXA Centre in Bristol raised over £20,000 for Children in Need and the pledge line we ran for the South West region raised a total of £102,305. At AXA PPP healthcare, over 150 employees volunteered to man 80 donation lines and collected pledges worth £152,393. AXA PPP healthcare also raised over £1,600 from fundraising activities.