What we give to

Eighty per cent of our community and pro bono contribution falls into our four themes: 24 per cent of our contribution is made to disadvantaged young people, 22 per cent to access to justice, 20 per cent to human rights and 14 per cent to homelessness.

Graph of What we give 2006/7

Breakdown by subject focus London Mainland Europe Asia and Middle East US Worldwide
Education and young people £554,034 £94,055 £40,121 £18,583 £706,793
Access to justice £516,830 £113,576 £7,569 £60,431 £698,406
Human rights £630,187 £4,685 0 £11,483 £646,355
Homelessness £417,207 £25,982 0 £12,609 £455,798
Health £156,757 £23,090 £5,000 £11,178 £196,025
Other social welfare £78,824 £24,812 0 £6,607 £110,243
Economic development 0 £3,786 £43,109 0 £46,895
Arts and culture £6,500 £10,167 0 £18,276 £34,943
Emergency relief £27,095 £1,170 £2,951 0 £31,216
Environment £9,680 0 0 0 £9,680
Other £140,476 £27,063 £559 £5,523 £173,621

As the programme has evolved over a number of years and each office is responsible for developing its own programme, we do support other initiatives. For example, in London we provide a considerable amount of pro bono legal advice to Cancer Research UK. Our German offices are also actively engaged in various health initiatives, giving pro bono assistance to Lebenshilfe Frankfurt and supporting blood collections for the Red Cross and Children with Leukaemia, while our Chinese offices are involved in economic development, providing pro bono legal advice to a microfinance project.

As a supporter of Dance in Europe, Vienna is our largest contributor in terms of arts and culture, followed by New York and Washington.

Our offices in China, France and Hong Kong are all involved in some way with Plan International, a charity that works to achieve lasting improvements for children living in poverty in developing countries. We look forward to exploring other opportunities with the charity in 2008.

HIV and AIDS

Since 2004, our fundraising and house-building activities with Habitat for Humanity have focused on providing homes for children in Durban, South Africa, who have been orphaned by HIV and AIDS. Our office in Washington provides pro bono legal advice to the Global Campaign for Microbicides, a public health organisation whose primary purpose is to co-ordinate worldwide efforts to develop and distribute microbicides that prevent sexual transmission of HIV. We are providing pro bono advice to the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative in connection with its partnership with UNITAID to supply HIV/AIDS treatments, particularly for children, in 38 countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Lawyers from our New York, London, Amsterdam and Paris offices also recently began working on a joint Lawyers Without Borders and Save the Children UK project relating to property and inheritance rights for women and children in Africa in light of the HIV/Aids pandemic.

Our community and pro bono data has been compiled according to London Benchmarking Group (LBG) measurement principles. Our application of the LBG model has been assured by The Corporate Citizenship Company.