Yorkshire Building Society Social Purpose & Sustainability Team

Client: Age UK, Citizens Advice, Good Things Foundation

The 12-person CSR team drives Yorkshire Building Society's purpose: Real Help with Real Life through a set of social initiatives. These include efforts to improve financial wellbeing in the community and supporting people to have a place to call home.

As a mutual organisation, we have a long-standing commitment to giving back to the communities in which we live and work through fundraising, volunteering, and supporting good causes. But recent unprecedented circumstances have put additional pressure on our local communities. In response, we have significantly increased our community investment and committed over £1.8m during 2021/22 to support our purposeful agenda, which focuses on financial education, skills development, employment, and wellbeing.

2022 highlights: • Our programmes reached 96,040 people, up 52% from 2021 • The team recruited 18% of all colleagues to volunteer and 62% of retail colleagues • We contributed 5,467 hours of volunteering, equating to a volunteering value of £102,782 • We raised over £900,000, fully funding Age UK's Building Better Lives programme until May 2023 • We expanded our innovative award-winning partnership with Citizens Advice, hosting advisors in 18 of our retail locations and since the launch, have supported 2151 individuals • £9M milestone reached in donations to charities from the YBS Charitable Foundation