At the heart of RELX

Despite the challenges of current times, our colleagues have shown there are lots of ways to get involved and make a contribution to their community. Across RELX we have been encouraging employees to use their Cares hours to give back in creative ways, relaxing the requirement for time to be used only for registered charities.

Employees across the group have used their time and talent to organise in-person and virtual volunteer initiatives around the world. Activities include sewing masks for healthcare workers, writing cards and letters to accompany free meals for seniors, hosting virtual workshops and mentoring sessions for youth charity partners, running food and book drives for local non-profits, cleaning up rivers, beaches and parks, organising virtual walks and cycling tours to fundraise for health-related charities and much more.

In 2021, we held the eleventh Recognising Those Who Care Awards to highlight colleagues who made outstanding contributions to their community during the pandemic. The winners – two individuals and two teams – each chose a charity to receive a RELX donation.

Colleagues at LexisNexis Risk Solutions came together to record a song by the Foo Fighters to support our global fundraising partner Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), which aims to ensure children grow up in families not institutions. Sixty-nine musicians and singers from across the globe worked together on the project using RELX Cares time. The finished video has amassed thousands of views and raised over $12,000. In addition, over 200 colleagues from across RELX took part in a 50K Your Way Fitness Challenge to raise funds for HHC.

One of the most impactful ways in which our people give back is by using their specialist skills and talents to support the communities and causes they care about.

With the help of Taproot Foundation, LexisNexis Risk Solutions piloted the Cares Pro Bono initiative at the Alpharetta, Georgia headquarters in December 2018 and it has been running ever since. The project pairs select local non-profits with talented teams of employees who work to help the organisations solve some of their most pressing business and/or technology-related challenges. This programme was designed to provide employees with the opportunity to showcase and further develop their professional skills, build our brand in the community, deepen the impact of our Cares programme, and assist in connecting our employees to a purpose.

The project currently benefits the science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) education programmes of five local non-profit partners: Amana Academy, a top charter school in Georgia; Safe Kids Georgia, an injury prevention program for youth ages 19 and under; Andrew Simpkins Innovation Foundation, STEAM Truck and Technology Association of Georgia Education Collaborative (TAG Ed).

Volunteers visit and meet with the non-profit partners over a 12-week period, working alongside their leadership staff to complete an actionable plan. In 2019, the teams donated pro bono services valued at $205,000.

“The [Risk Solutions] team members are very invested in our success,” said a representative from Amana Academy. “Their hearts are in the right place – they’re not doing this just to check a box and say they’ve done community service. They’re really interested in doing this type of work and giving back.”

Helping disadvantaged young people is the core focus of our Cares progamme globally. For that reason, the RX Cares programme in Norwalk, Connecticut has been involved with Kids In Crisis (KIC) for nearly eight years.

Kids in Crisis’ (KIC) mission is to ensure the well-being of children through vital 24-hour crisis services. With outreach programmes in schools and communities, on and off-site support and temporary, therapeutic emergency shelter for children ages 9-17 through their SafeHaven programme, KIC is there to help. KIC provides free prevention education and interventions in local schools via its TeenTalk programme and advocacy for children at national and local levels.

From cleaning up the emergency shelter to volunteering at KIC annual fundraisers and collecting holiday gifts for the children served by KIC, the RX Norwalk team has been diligent with the time and energy provided to KIC with hands-on help.

Each spring, the team puts forward a grant application for the RELX donations round. This funding helps to offset the cost of having a TeenTalk counsellor at Brien McMahon High School, a public high school that serves a majority of disadvantaged students in Norwalk. Teen Talk provides specially trained, Masters level mental health counselors in area middle and high schools to identify at risk students who need help with personal, family and school related challenges.

More recently, KIC added “Lighthouse” to its list of services, providing a welcoming, safe, inclusive space where LGBTQ youth and their allies meet weekly. RX Norwalk’s Cares programme sponsors monthly pizza dinners at these meetings and one of their members serves as a facilitator.

“It is Kids In Crisis’ commitment to provide safe spaces for children, many of whom struggle with mental health and family conflict issues, that drives the level of engagement of our employees,” believes Christine Seiden, Manager of Corporate Responsibility at RX and Cares Champion. “It’s really as simple as that. And I know that each time an RX Norwalk employee has their first experience volunteering with Kids In Crisis it won’t be their last.”

Invaluable research being carried out in African countries is often not effectively disseminated either to African researchers or to a wider international audience. To boost the impact and discoverability of African health research, the Elsevier Foundation created “Research without Borders,” a skills-based volunteering partnership with the African Journal Partnership Program (AJPP) tapping into Elsevier’s expertise in publishing, marketing, operations and technology.

With a grant of $204,000 over the course of three years, Elsevier volunteers provide supplementary training to the African journals for a period of one to four weeks in-country. Over the past couple of years, 34 volunteers have contributed a total of a total of 97 weeks of time-sharing expertise to provide strategic, editorial communication and operational guidance .

Six staff members of the Mali and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) journals were hosted in Amsterdam for a week to boost the impact of their publications; and an additional francophone training week was organised in the Paris office, and in Kigali during the Africa Health Agenda International Conference (AHAIC).

“The AJPP and the Elsevier Foundation’s Research without Borders programme gave voice to a small research project, which might have gone unnoticed,” said Cheryl Mutabazi, a breast cancer survivor and board member of the Breast Cancer Initiative East Africa, “but the findings are critical in identifying a key factor in prevention.”

Read more about the project development and the volunteers’ experiences.

One of the most devastating consequences of homelessness is the impact it can have on a child's education. Since education is key to success, our employees are always looking for ways to help students in need.

Cares New York City has partnered with RELX’s NYC chapter of Women Connected in support of Operation Backpack®, a community service of Volunteers of America-Greater New York that provides new, top quality backpacks filled with grade-specific supplies to any child living in a NYC homeless or domestic violence shelter who needs one.

In July 2019, over 30 volunteers in the NYC office from across several RELX business areas worked together to donate 105 backpacks, each filled with all the school supplies New York City 5th-8th grade students need to succeed in the school year.

In August 2019, just in time for the back-to-school season, volunteers from across RELX gathered at one of Volunteers of America’s NYC warehouses to help sort backpacks along with other corporate groups.

“The experience is simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking!” said Carrie Christensen, a publisher at Elsevier. “You walk into a warehouse full of volunteers, supplies and activity like elves the week of Christmas; and it is literally heartwarming to be part of a team helping prepare backpacks of brand-new school supplies for children in need. While assembling packs for the Pre-K group, it dawned on me that Pre-K age is 3 or 4-years-old, a homeless 3 or 4-year-old… heartbreaking… just heartbreaking.”

Cares community projects aim to give help and hope to those who need it through the time and talent of our people.

In the Philippines, cancer is a national health priority. During the summer of 2019, Reed Elsevier Philippines (REPH) volunteered with a private group that has stepped forward to counter cancer, the Friends of Cancer Kids in Iloilo Foundation, Inc. (FCKIFI). FCKIFI aims to “fight against the hopelessness that the kids with cancer and their family feel.”

33 volunteers from REPH’s Writers Guild and Book Club Iloilo joined together to volunteer at Camp Kalipay, an annual 3-day camp for children with cancer and their families.

Volunteers shared best practices in writing and storytelling with the kids and engaged in arts, crafts and games throughout the day. Through these activities, our employees were able to connect with these children, who despite their illnesses, have the motivation to cherish life and live it to the fullest.

“One of the benefits of being a volunteer is the intangible blessing that you receive while making a difference to the lives of children,” said Leez Sanares, HR Employee Engagement and Organisational Development Specialist from REPH Iloilo. “Looking at the kids’ faces and seeing them inspired on winning their battle against cancer, inspires me to become better and makes me appreciate everything that life has to offer.”

Our people are quick to respond in times of trouble. On 30 May 2019, 18 tornadoes swept through Dayton, Ohio leaving a path of destruction across many local communities. One tornado was classified as an EF4, with winds up to 170mph. Our largest North American RELX site is based in Dayton and the employee groups across that site banded together to help communities in need.

In the days immediately following the tornadoes, the Dayton Site Council, which is made up of all the Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) on campus along with business area representation from across RELX, was able to organise and implement a disaster relief donation drive. The Council collected $4,000 in gift cards and car-loads of food and toiletry items to get necessities out to the communities hit hardest.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions provided citizens of Ohio with access to VitalChek to request records free of charge and partnered with LexisNexis Legal & Professional to establish a donation microsite in support of the Midwest Tornadoes and Floods.

Dayton’s African Ancestry Network (AAN) collaborated with two community organisations and took 26 volunteers from campus to help move four low-income families out of their damaged homes, to various locations across the county.

“Being a lifelong resident of the Dayton area, it was heart wrenching to see the devastation caused by these tornadoes.” said William Houston, President of the Dayton chapter of AAN and Software Engineering Manager at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “It was amazing however to see how the community came together to help those affected by the tornadoes. It was very rewarding to be a part of the effort to help residents impacted by the destruction, and I was grateful that members of RELX were able to go out and lend a helping hand to our neighbours.”

The need is still great in the Dayton communities and rebuilding will take months, even years. Pamela Rath, Dayton Cares Champion and Senior Director of Communications at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, noted “We expect to have many more of our red Cares shirts out in these neighbourhoods continuing to support those in need.”