Disasters and pandemic don’t discriminate. This year more than ever has highlighted our interconnectedness and how addressing societal issues requires collaboration, solidarity and creativity.
At Red Cross, we recognise that by leveraging our collective channels, expertise and networks we can better meet community needs. For this reason, we work closely with our business and philanthropic partners to reach the community in times of need.
COVID Connect phone calls were made by volunteers from 12 different corporate partners over a period of 4 months to June 2020. As the service continues, so too does the support from partners, who are continuing to assist the community with these calls. CBRE’s CEO joined the callers, along with volunteers from Origin Foundation, IAG, Lendlease, CUA, FFA, QBE, KWM, NRMA, Capgemini, Bupa, and NAB.
The Kellogg’s Kindness Project: a group of employees volunteered to pack 300 gift hampers with personalised kindness cards to reach out to 300 migrants in transition and their families impacted by COVID in Cairns, Adelaide and Regional NSW.
Accenture identified opportunities to optimise current processes and systems that facilitate the current volunteer recruitment and onboarding process. With their continued support, a number of process updates were tested in ‘real time’ to improve the corporate on-boarding experience to support COVID 19 response as part of the initiative ‘COVID Connect’. Accenture’s insights and concepts have helped the whole organisation see the opportunities to improve volunteer experience and get involved in prototyping a very different future state.
Bronwyn Thompson from Coca-Cola Company was a corporate volunteer in our COVID Connect program.
Commbank supported Red Cross’ bushfire relief efforts by donating generously and enabling customers to make donations through all of their branches and via their banking app. This raised over $4M. Commbank is not only a supporter of our disaster work, but also partner with us to help build resilience in drought impacted communities.
BHP Foundation is another partner who has lent support through the past year, through bushfires and the drought. BHP Foundation works with Red Cross to build resilience in drought impacted communities, focussing on the psychosocial impacts of a changing climate for drought impacted families and communities.
Origin Foundation partnered with Red Cross by providing 11 executive mentors to work with corresponding executives from Red Cross, as well as partnering with us on a volunteering program that included being an invaluable part of the COVID Connect calls.
Coles enabled donation options at all of their supermarket checkouts to allow customers to donate directly to Red Cross for the bushfires.
FFA became a community partner and worked to share important messages regarding COVID-19 amongst their networks via their social media channels, as well as providing volunteers to assist with COVID Connect calls.
NRMA provided over 40 staff to support our Emergency Services team to make telephone outreach calls to people in mandatory quarantine due to COVID-19.
Land Rover donated 20 additional vehicles to help scale our response to the summer bushfires. Land Rover and Red Cross have been partnering since 2014 with the goal to get more Australians better prepared and more resilient to disasters.
Land Rover donated 20 additional vehicles to support our bushfire response and recovery work.
Amazon supported our MSP program in Victoria, providing their delivery drivers for 10 weeks to help deliver food and care packages to vulnerable migrant clients impacted by COVID-19.
Apple generously directed their financial support to enable Red Cross to provide financial grants to people who lost their homes due to bushfires in early 2019. In some cases, people who lost their homes in early 2019 were on the same street as people who lost their homes in recent bushfires. However, due to the timings they were unable to access Red Cross grants. Apple made this possible.
Our long-term partner IAG worked closely with us to deliver preparedness messaging at scale all year round, utilising our co-created Get Prepared app as a call to action. In May 2020, in response to the impact of COVID-19, IAG redirected $150k in donations through brands NRMA and SGIO into Red Cross’ COVID-19 response work. Additionally, the IAG Foundation helped to mobilise IAG staff from across Australia to volunteer – making calls to people socially isolated due to lockdowns through our COVID Connect program.
NAB activated their call centre staff to support our call centre with overflow calls during the ABC New Year’s Eve bushfire appeal.
This year saw the commencement of a three-year community partnership with Australia Post. Even before we officially signed the dotted line, Australia Post was there in the wake of the Black Summer bushfires – taking over $1.2M in over-the-counter donations at Post Offices/LPOs across the country, and raising $200k through the sale of Disaster Relief Stamps. Currently they are supporting our efforts to spread the word around new/expanded bushfire grants in impacted communities via their Unaddressed Mail Service – reaching people in a way that we simply couldn’t do without them.
Leah Boyd, General Counsel for CBRE Asia Pacific, making wellbeing check-in calls to isolated and quarantined people as a corporate volunteer in the COVID Connect program.
Lendlease and Red Cross have joined forces in a three-year partnership to support the Katherine community in the Northern Territory. Together, Lendlease and Red Cross will work closely with Katherine residents, harnessing their strengths and skills to tackle local issues.
INPEX-operated Ichthys LNG has been supporting the Safe Hang Out for All Kids (SHAK) in Darwin for the last five years. Together INPEX and Red Cross continue to work collaboratively to achieve joint objectives including help build vibrant, prosperous and resilient communities and improve the health, wellbeing and social connectedness of young people in Darwin.
The design teams at Fjord helped to identify opportunities to improve and scale our volunteering on-boarding and improvement to corporate volunteering to aid our COVID-19 response.
Leaders from QBE, Australian Red Cross and Save the Children at the launch of the three-year partnership (2019–2022) to work with communities to build their resilience and save lives by improving their capacity to prepare, anticipate, respond and recover from disasters in Australia and internationally.
QBE and Red Cross entered into a strategic multi-year partnership in November 2019. This partnership enables the rapid mobilisation of support for disaster relief activities in response to catastrophic events in Asia-Pacific, and support disaster preparedness and climate resilience initiatives for vulnerable communities. In May 2020, QBE also held a double impact matched giving campaign, raising over $130k to enable us to continue delivering vital services to communities who have experienced the double impacts of COVID-19 and disasters, loneliness, forced migration or war.
KPMG worked with our team to help design our bushfire disaster recovery framework.
We acknowledge and thank the 467 corporates who are part of our workplace giving program, enabling employees to donate over $7M through their payroll systems. The top ten workplace giving partners are: Google, Oracle, Telstra, MSN CI Portal, ANZ, Macquarie, BHP, Apple, Hewlett Packard and VISA.
We also acknowledge and thank our corporate partners supporting our bushfire relief efforts: KWM, EY, Accenture, Microsoft, Deloitte, KPMG, Land Rover Australia, MSJ and HWL Ebsworth, among so many others.
Finally, we want to acknowledge the more than 600 corporate partners who we have worked with to deliver first aid and mental health training.
Academic collaborations
We acknowledge and thank the educational institutions who we’ve collaborated with this year including Swinburne University (Institute for Social Innovation), RMIT, Melbourne University, La Trobe University, UNSW, ANU, and Charles Darwin University.