22/12/2020
Looking Back at 2020 so we can Lead with Love in 2021
As we reflect on 2020, one thing is clear – it has been a year like no other. We want to take the time to reflect on the year, its challenges and opportunities and most importantly thank all those who have helped us to act as a Force For Good – through our business, our brands, and as individuals.
Around the world, the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we live, work and interact. More painfully, it has also taken the lives of many people around the world and our thoughts go to all those who have experienced personal loss at the hands of this pandemic.
Responding in times of local or national crisis isn’t something new for us, nor is helping vulnerable communities – it’s an everyday part of our Community Impact work across the region. However, what has been different with the outbreak of coronavirus, has been the scale, speed and agility of support needed.
Our work as P&G to support COVID-19 relief efforts has been ongoing behind the scenes at a Global, European and Country level across our markets. In order to provide the maximum support possible in Northern Europe, we upscaled support with partners that help us help the many, as well as building new partnerships to provide critical support to frontline healthcare workers.
We focussed our efforts in three areas:
- Providing the comforts of home through our products
- Utilising our innovation agility through our people
- Supporting charities and organisations through our business and brands
Providing the comforts of home through our products
Every single one of our Brands have stepped up during this time across the cluster. It has meant we’ve been able to donate millions of pounds worth of products to charities and community groups in need. Big and small.
Whether it was Always and Tampax, donating over 726,000 products to frontline workers at NHS Nightingale Hospitals, or our Hair Care Brands, Olay and Oral-B collectively donating almost £900,000 worth of products to frontline workers at over 60 NHS trusts across the country through Blue Lights Card, we’ve done everything we can to ensure that our brands’ vital everyday essentials are reaching those that need them most.
It would be impossible to list all the ways our brands have stepped up to serve all those who need them. As one example, we want to thank In Kind Direct, our longstanding charity partner and the UK’s leading charity distributing consumer goods, donated by retailers and manufacturers, to UK charities working here and abroad to help ensure that everyone has access to life's essentials. Since the first cases of coronavirus in Northern Europe, we scaled up our product donations to the charity allowing us to provide hundreds of thousands of essential products with an estimated retail value of more than £1.2 million - from Pampers nappies to Flash spray, Fairy liquid to Gillette razors and many more. Thanks to our partnership with In Kind Direct, we’ve been able to provide vital support to over 2,600 grassroots charitable organisations, helping those in need across the UK.
Utilising our innovation agility through our people
Our plant and manufacturing teams across the globe harnessed their innovation capabilities to allow us to provide additional relief outside of our brands. In Northern Europe, the agility of our teams allowed us to manufacture and donate:
- 28,500 litres of Hand Sanitiser manufactured to the WHO Formula 1, donated to charities across the UK through partners such as British and Swedish Red Cross, In Kind Direct, and FareShareUK.
That’s the equivalent to enabling 9.5 million hand washes - 1.3 million Face Masks donated to charities across the UK through In Kind Direct and Irish Red Cross
- 15,000 Shields to Royal Berkshire Hospital helping to keep their staff protected whilst they continue their essential caregiving roles.
Supporting charities and organisations through our business and brands
At a time when we know charities and community organisations have been under tremendous strain, we’ve also provided much needed financial support to national and local partners.
In the UK, donations to the British Red Cross, In Kind Direct and a number of organisations local to all our sites have so far totalled almost £1 million. This includes donations to charities such as Macmillan, Refuge, CALM, Young Women’s Trust, Women’s Aid, Mermaids and many more charities across the UK.
Most importantly, we’re not done.
We remain committed to stepping up as a Force For Good through our brands, our people and our resources to make a positive impact with our priorities remaining behind protecting P&G employees, serving those who rely on our products to take care of their personal health and hygiene and create clean and healthy homes, and supporting communities.
In addition to the coronavirus pandemic, this year saw the world acknowledge a much longer and deep-rooted crisis of systemic racism. The tragic events in the US marked the inflection point at which we all opened our eyes to the inequality and racism that still exists in society today. We took a stand, we made a commitment to learn, to understand and to do more to ensure that racism had no place in our workplaces or societies.
For years, we have used our voice as a leading advertiser to shine a light on inequality, highlight bias and spark dialogue that leads to understanding and action with award-winning short films like “The Talk”, “The Look” and “The Choice”. We aspire to create a company and a world where equality and inclusion is achievable for all; where respect and inclusion are the cornerstones of our culture; where equal access and opportunity to learn, grow, succeed and thrive are available to everyone. We have stepped up our efforts to ensure we are creating a culture of allyship within our own organisation, driving education and discussion around equality as well as making a commitment to increase representation and development of BAME employees by signing up to the BITC Race at Work charter.
Together, we can make real lasting change when we actively work to prevent, address and rectify inequality — individually and collectively.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s the power that a little love can have. Over the last year, we’ve witnessed beautiful moments of human kindness and have come together to support each other – even while going through some of the most difficult health, economic and societal crises in modern time. But we know there is even more we can do.
When we Lead With Love, we create a better world.
That’s why, as we turn the page on 2020, P&G and our brands are committing to Lead with Love by undertaking 2,021 acts of good throughout 2021 – for our communities, for equality and for the planet we call home.
For more information and to find out how you can join us, visit https://us.pg.com/lead-with-love/
Looking back on 2020, one word stands out to me – change. The world has seen change like never before, with the coronavirus pandemic changing the way we live and work – perhaps forever. With change comes the opportunity for growth, new partnerships, and the opportunity to reflect. Our heartfelt thanks goes out to the NHS and other frontline workers and to the charities and organisations many communities across the country depend upon. The work we have undertaken has been focused on helping them help the many. Whether that’s providing a parent with a Pampers nappy to ensure that they can provide essential care to their baby or giving a charity volunteer supported by In Kind Direct access to hand sanitiser to allow them to safely distribute key essentials to vulnerable families. Our work cannot stop here. We continue to adapt, respond and support in the small ways we can, as we all join together to win this fight and be part of the recovery"
