February 13 2020
As a charity with #ProductGiving at its heart, the Manifesto is central to everything we do to support charitable organisations working in the front line, tackling a wide range of social issues.
To inspire and to advocate are the first two of our Manifesto commitments.
We are dedicated to continue to inspire product philanthropy, by engaging with our stakeholder groups - charities, companies and funders - to understand their challenges, needs and priorities, in order to deliver the best 'customer' experience and build long-term mutually beneficial partnerships.
We want to advocate #ProductGiving and move it up the agenda, by sharing the powerful impact it has on a range of pressing social issues. We want retailers and manufacturers to see it as a simple solution to achieve some of their Corporate Responsibility objectives.
Donating product changes lives. It generates powerful social impact, benefiting businesses, their employees and stakeholders, while supporting communities and protecting the environment. This can be an easy win for companies to demonstrate their CSR values.
This is perfectly illustrated by essity’s commitment since 2017 to donate 100,000 Bodyform sanitary pads each month to In Kind Direct. This practical response followed reports about women and girls becoming socially isolated and even missing school due to a lack of appropriate sanitary protection. Indeed, donating pads to help relieve period poverty is fully in line with one of essity’s core values, which is to Care. This is also why the company decided to renew its fantastic commitment for another three years in December 2019.
Period poverty remains a very real problem for thousands of girls and women across the UK and we are not giving up the fight. So far, we have donated 3.6million pads to local community groups and charitable organisations and we have seen the positive impact this has had. Seeing the tangible benefit of our donations gives our employees something to feel genuinely proud about and our consumers like to know that the brand they are buying is a brand that cares.