For the firm that has shown the greatest leadership and innovation in engaging clients or its own people in philanthropy and/or social investment.
2019 Joint winners
C. Hoare & Co and Mayer Brown
Lucy Porter, the team from Mayer Brown, Rennie Hoare (C Hoare & Co) with John Pepin (Philanthropy Impact)
C. Hoare & Co has a long history of innovative philanthropy. The firm gives 10% of annual profits to its charitable trust, was the first UK private bank to launch a Donor Advised Fund (DAF), and at the end of 2016, the trust was a founding partner of a new social impact investment fund, Project Snowball.
The bank has developed completely new approaches for its trust and employee giving. Philanthropic leadership is shown at every level of the company, with 50% of the staff participating in Give-as-you-earn, and each £1 double-matched by the bank’s charitable trust, resulting in £240,000 staff-driven contributions to charity in 2017 (earning a CAF GAYE Platinum award). Personal engagement allows staff to speak as philanthropy practitioners. Building on this foundation, the bank has implemented a philanthropy programme specially designed by the charity (BeMORE) and have pioneered its use in a corporate environment.
We commend C. Hoare & Co for their continued innovation and active philanthropic leadership by example. Philanthropy starts at the top of their business and permeates the whole culture, exemplified by their statement of purpose: ‘good bankers, good citizens’, and they are embedding this into staff training and encouragement to engage in philanthropy.
“We are very pleased to announce that we have been awarded best philanthropy engagement by the Managing Partners Forum. The Awards provide companies with independent evidence of their contribution to, amongst other things, responsible business. As a bank, our purpose is to be both good bankers and good citizens, and it is fantastic that our efforts in this area have been recognised.”
Rennie Hoare, Partner and Head of Philanthropy at C. Hoare& Co.
Mayer Brown’s submission for this category states that “its guiding purpose of its pro bono programme is to attack systemic problems, providing high quality advice to those in need”. It amply demonstrated its commitment to this objective through its cross-practice initiative over two years, engaging its Corporate & Securities and Derivatives & Structured Products practices in developing an innovative climate insurance initiative, The African and Asian Resilience in Disaster Insurance Scheme (ARDIS), backed by the UK and German governments.
While the ARDIS programme is nascent, “over 690,000 families totalling up to four million people living in six low-income countries stand to benefit”. By increasing access to uninsured rural families and farmers, this programme alone has the potential to meet one per cent of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, providing a previously unheard of measure of insurance protection against climate risk for the world’s most vulnerable populations. It was only via the sustained efforts of Mayer Brown that the legal and regulatory complexities were overcome, giving birth to this invaluable programme.
Mayer Brown’s outstanding work required not only technical acumen but resilience and patience given the respective demands of the multiple stakeholders in two jurisdictions. The firm was commended in 2018 in the FT Innovative Lawyers Europe for Managing Complexity and Scale. Today we recognise and commend Mayer Brown for delivering handsomely on its objective to tackle systemic problems, in this instance, on a global scale.
2019 SPONSOR
OTHER SHORTLISTED FIRMS
Barclays Private Bank
Dentons
Prism the Gift Fund
Ten Years’ Time
