Community

Vicki Singleton promoting civil engineering in the communityKey to managing our impact and business successfully are our relationships with customers, staff, suppliers, partners and the communities in which we live and work. As part of this approach, we use the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility to help balance the requirements of our business and manage our social and environmental impacts.

Making a tangible difference in people's lives and serving our customers' needs to the best of our abilities involves respect, cultural awareness, open communication and consultation and long term commitment. It is also about following the principles of sustainable development and attempting to ensure that our solutions don't result in the use of natural resources beyond the environment's capacity to renew them.As part of this approach we are dedicated to being responsible corporate citizens and regularly work with funding agencies and non-governmental organisations to help bring basic services such as water, electricity, healthcare and education to deprived communities and developing countries.

Our staff play a central role in the service we provide and the difference we are able to make. In order to help them achieve their full potential and realise their aspirations, we support training, secondments, sabbaticals, leadership and development. Staff from around the world regularly meet for forums to promote development and share information, and participate in the senior management programme at Ashridge Business School in the UK

We also work with a number of schools and universities in order to contribute towards continuous learning, improvement and professional excellence as well as championing and supporting the many professions to which our staff belong.

Putting our beliefs into action, we're a patron of RedR-IHE which provides trained and competent persons to help reduce suffering of people hit by natural disasters. RedR works widely with many humanitarian agencies worldwide. We also support staff directly for charitable organisations such as Oxfam, Save the Children and TearFund. We also support Engineers without Borders, a university run charitable initiative that among its various schemes has developed water filters and environmentally friendly cookers for local communities in Ecuador.

We are also members of Business in the Community, which seeks to inspire, challenge, engage and support business in continually improving its positive impact on society. We’ve sponsored a local community consultant and are supporting local schools with mentoring and reading scheme and local communities with redecoration of facilities and assistance with environmental ‘tidy-ups’.

As well as being involved in Global School Partnership, promoting partnerships between schools in the UK and developing countries, our not-for-profit arm Cambridge Education Foundation is also supporting various community initiatives. In China for example, we’ve set up a dedicated fund for 400 poor, minority girls from some of the remotest rural communities in Western China’s Gansu province.

Our health team, HLSP supports the UK's Department for International Development Health Resource Centre and provides consultancy services on HIV/AIDS, maternal reproductive diseases and child health and other communicable diseases as well as assisting the UN's Global Fund for the fight against AIDS, malaria and TB. For example the Institute has been looking at the economics of global health partnerships and on international funding for TB and malaria to study if there are sufficient resources allocated to TB and malaria, plus HIV and AIDS.