Community engagement
Community engagement is a core element of our local businesses, with campaigns, appeals and a wide range of other local activities forming part of the everyday activities of our titles. For example, this support can either be by advertising the activities of a charity or by running appeals through which our readers donate to good causes. In addition, however, the Company also contributes directly, through cash donations, to a variety of charities.
Each year our newspapers get involved in a large range of charitable fundraising campaigns and support good causes. Our local newspapers, being at the heart of communities, campaign on a wide range of local issues and spearhead fundraising activities.
In the North East for example The Sunshine Fund, which was established in 1928 by King George V and adopted by the Evening Chronicle in 1995 has, since then, provided over £700,000 for essential equipment, learning aids and custom-built apparatus to improve the quality of children’s lives across the region.
In July the Newcastle Evening Chronicle launched the “Give Tilly A Hand Appeal” to raise the money to help the youngster live as normal a life as possible after the 21-month-old lost both her hands and toes to meningitis. After starting the appeal with £5,000 from the newspaper’s own Sunshine Fund, readers were challenged to make up the difference. Donations from businesses and readers flooded into the Newcastle Evening Chronicle offices and within two days the money had been raised.
On 17 August 2007 our largest national title, the Daily Mirror, donated 2p for every copy sold to the children’s charity ChildLine. The paper also included a four-page editorial feature on ChildLine. This was part of wider support where all the Group’s national titles as well as a number of websites and regional newspapers, including The Birmingham Mail, Liverpool Echo, Newcastle Chronicle and the South Wales Echo, also promoted the campaign.
We back this work up with further commitment from our own workforce and the Group has an Employee Volunteering Policy which enables all our employees to volunteer to work for a day to support a good cause in their area.
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