Lara helps to oversee and co-ordinate CSR activity at LCP. In this blog, she takes a look at the CSR highpoints over the last year.

2019 has been a year of firsts. We marched at London Pride for the first time; over 30 LCPers danced, waved and high-fived their way through central London for LGBT+ rights and equality. Another first was achieved at our internal LCP CARES awards where our people broke the four digit barrier and made over 1,000 nominations of colleagues, celebrating the contributions other people make. We also donated our first grants to charities from the LCP charitable Foundation.

The LCP Foundation was launched this year and supports some of the charities closest to our hearts: West London Mission and Trinity Winchester. Caring for the homeless and supporting vulnerable people has been part of our culture at LCP for many years and we are delighted to be able to take this to the next level.

As well as making direct grants to individual charities, our Foundation has been matching the fundraising of LCP partners and staff. We've been utterly impressed with our people's endeavours - from the extreme to the absurd (Omar ran 10k dressed in a full body Anubis costume!). The LCP Foundation has also matched fundraising at our internally organised events. A personal highlight of ours was the delicious plantain fritters at our multicultural lunch event for UN International Day of Charity.

We want to say thank you to all of our people that have been a part of our CSR achievements this year. Nearly 100 people are involved in our amazing groups representing our people - such as our Women's Network and Wellbeing group. Another first we have achieved this year is hitting the MHFA England target to have over 10% of our people mental health first aid trained.

We are particularly passionate about all of these causes and we love working at a company that cares about these too. Environmental concerns have been ubiquitous this year. We're proud to be doing our part wherever we can - for example our new refurbished premises in Winchester will have flashy solar panels in the new year. Our individual actions all add up too, from our crisp packet recycling scheme to our Responsible Investment consulting.

It's been a great year for CSR at LCP and Christmas is the perfect time to come together and celebrate. We've already had candy cane giveaways, shoebox appeals and a Christmas jumper day - and we've both got our eyes on the big prize of annual leave from this year's Christmas raffle.

Merry Christmas!