With our presence across cities, regions and remote areas, we are a part of the fabric of society. We use our resources and skills to partner with the communities that we are part of to improve the health and well-being of our customers, creating employment opportunities for young Australians and New Zealanders, and supporting communities facing natural disasters with emergency relief and post-disaster recovery. Some of our initiatives include Free Fruit for Kids, S.T.A.N.D., and programs with our food rescue partners such as OzHarvest and Foodbank.
In addition to Woolworths’ direct contribution to community partnerships, we help customers contribute directly to charitable organisations. Many Australian and New Zealand communities have a Woolworths business in their town centre, and this provides us with the opportunity to engage with our customers, team members and suppliers to raise awareness of and contribute vital funding to community programs.
We will manage our community investments under a best practice social accounting framework, such as the London Benchmarking Group (LBG) methodology, to ensure that we meet the targets we set.
Reporting social impacts shows how our community partners are improving and transforming lives, including those of our team members and customers. This will allow us to highlight the impacts of ‘Good Acts’, raising the awareness of our community partners’ work.
Our goal is to contribute the equivalent to at least 1% of our pre-tax profits (on a three-year rolling average) every year to the communities in which we operate.
Contribution to the community1 as a % of pre-tax profit2 on a rolling average basis
We receive many requests from worthy causes. However, unfortunately, we are unable to support them all. In order to appropriately channel our support our community investment does not provide funding for the following: