Through a long-standing strategic partnership with Islington Giving, Macquarie has helped to make an impact on the local community of its London office – providing over £1m in the last 10 years with a commitment to future funding for the non-profit.

BIG Alliance launched the second Fusion Mentoring Programme, in collaboration with Macquarie Group’s Fusion Network – an employee network group which seeks to empower colleagues of different races, ethnicities, cultures, and faiths.

BIG Alliance partnered with Macquarie Group and their summer interns for a second year to offer solutions to strategic challenges put forward by Islington's community organisations.

This year, BIG Alliance launched their pilot Fusion Mentoring programme, in partnership with Macquarie Foundation’s Fusion Network. Read more about how the programme supports the young people of Islington here.

In July, teams of Macquarie Group employees and summer interns supported five Islington community organisations with their strategic challenges. Find out more about the programme and read our Evaluation report here.

Last month we launched the 13th cohort of our annual CoRe programme. Find out more about it here.

MMARAP joined our CoRe 2020 programme with the aim of improving their communications and marketing. Working with volunteers from Macquarie and Slaughter and May, they not only learned about website content and efficient use of social media, but also improved their fundraising as well as various policy documents.

The count is in: ELBA’s 2020 Toy Appeal was the biggest ever, with over 22,000 toys donated – that’s more than double the previous record. From that amazing total, over 2,200 toys went to Islington organisations who work with local families.

In the run up to Christmas, volunteers wrote cards and letters to vulnerable people feeling lonely and/or isolated.

During a “normal” year, Christmas can be an especially lonely time for many people. Amid a pandemic involving lockdowns and limited social contact, their experiences of loneliness and isolation are understandably more profound.

The onset of the pandemic has exacerbated financial inequalities. For young people, it has led to months without schooling, with most studying from home with varied resources and varied access to the internet and electronic devices.

To tackle this, ELBA and the BIG Alliance are proud to have recently launched and adapted our 2020/21 Mentoring Works programme to ensure we continue to support students that need it most.

As part of our skills-based volunteering offer, BIG Alliance recently moderated a pro bono consulting sprint (half day session) with two teams of volunteers from Macquarie Group’s Commodities and Global Markets team where they were given just a few hours to come up with the best solutions possible to a challenge set by Choices London CIC, our participating community partner.