Our commitment to our people
We recognise that we have a responsibility to ensure our business has a positive impact on the people, communities and environment around us.
We believe actions speak louder than words so we built the Forward Community Programme, invested significant sums of money and placed our approach to sustainable communities at the heart of our firm. We believe we’re leading the IP market in this space and we’re very proud of it.
Further details on all the areas that this firmwide initiative covers can be found here, however a summary of these initiatives can be found below. You can also download a copy of our Sustainable Communities Special Report here, which summarises all the work we have done as a firm over the last few years around charity, inclusivity and the environment as well as some of our plans for the future.
Inclusion & Diversity
We are a firm that is committed to diversity of thought, ideas and viewpoints and where all our people, regardless of their background, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability or sexual orientation feel they belong. Belonging and inclusivity for us is about the people we hire, the careers we nurture, the culture we build and the relationships we have with our clients. We have made many developments in these areas.
Our Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer works closely with the Inclusion & Diversity Collaboration Group to continually develop the firm’s I&D approach. We are proud to be using Rare Recruitment’s Contextual Recruitment System (CRS) which allows us to consider an applicant’s achievements in the context in which they were gained.
All members of our Management Board are personally signed up to the IP Inclusive Senior Leader’s Pledge. We are all committed to making real change. We’re already well on our way.
See more information on our Inclusion & Diversity here.
Community
For us this means nurturing our people, helping everyone develop and contributing to the wider communities in which we operate as well as supporting worthy causes with time and money.
We support charities at a firmwide and local office level and do this through our Forward Community Programme Charity Fund. We are currently supporting the British Science Association as our firmwide charity as well as Crest Awards, Food Cycle and Save the Children Emergency Fund. We also have a local charity for each office which has been chosen by our people.
Everyone that works at Mewburn Ellis has one community day per year to enable them to support causes they care about. In addition, we operate a Give As You Earn (GAYE) scheme, so our people can donate to charities of their choice in a simple and tax effective way. Our combined community effort has amounted to more than £750,000 of investment since 2020.
This is in addition to our more ad hoc fund raising activity, where we have supported charities and events such as Genes for Jeans, Children in Need and Save the Children. We are also an active supporter of UK Youth, a leading national charity, committed to providing access to appropriate, high quality services in every community so that young people are empowered to build bright futures, regardless of their background or circumstance.
See more information on our Community Giving here.
Sustainability
We believe we must play our part in reducing the use of energy, lowering carbon emissions and reducing waste and actively avoid causing environmental damage.
Sustainability is a complex area and an ongoing focus for our firm. Our priority is to make sure that the way we operate has as little environmental impact as possible. We are looking at how we deal with waste, energy and reducing our carbon footprint (we aim to be a carbon neutral business by 2025) with the objective to eliminate our use if we can, reduce where possible or substitute if necessary. This is a broad approach and covers everything from how we manage our offices to the travel we undertake the decisions we make about the suppliers and products we use.
See our 5 step climate action plan and learn more about the Mewburn Ellis forest here.
