Corporate Responsibility

We’re only as strong as the communities in which we operate. So it makes sense for us to be responsible citizens, by supporting local communities with the skills and resources that we have.

We focus our efforts on two key areas: helping disadvantaged youth achieve their full potential and providing professional services to charitable organisations. We also ensure that our initiatives are sustainable, and that we’re there for our beneficiaries for the long term.

Besides making a difference in society, our people also benefit by learning new skills, gaining personal fulfillment and building deeper relationships with their community.

Read on to learn more about how our Corporate Responsibility initiatives and programmes support United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

In FY17, we note the small increase in the number of volunteers while the volunteering hours declined. While there's an increase in the number of volunteers on our other programmes, the decrease in volunteering hours is mainly due to the greater work commitments of our junior staff, impacting the number of volunteers who are able to volunteer for 2-weeks on our Community Outreach Programme (COP).

We have taken steps to tweak the volunteering duration for the Community Outreach Programme to strike a balance between the needs of serving our clients and our beneficiaries. Even with the slight decline, the COP remains our most popular volunteering activity. 36% of our total volunteers are on the COP during the year.

In the past year, there have been a number of teams in PwC who have indicated interest in organising their own volunteering activities, a sign that Corporate Responsibility is well received at PwC. With the enthusiasm and interest of our people, we are confident that we will achieve our goal of 400 volunteers a year, starting from FY2018.

There is also a two-fold increase in donations, mainly due to PwC's commitment of RM50,000 in support of Teach for Malaysia (TFM). We will continue funding TFM over the next two years.

We are encouraged to hear that our initiatives are making a positive impact on our volunteers too, with our PwC Volunteer Survey 2017 revealing that 29% of our volunteers said they would not have developed the same way through regular work alone.

Creating positive impact on communities

We measure the impact of our community outreach activities (COP, MYReaders, Money and Me), as it helps us evaluate their effectiveness in making a change. We are happy to share that our activities have made a positive impact on the participating schools and charity homes, in terms of cost saving on educational programmes.

To gather the results, we asked ourselves, “How much would charity homes or schools have to spend to enroll each child for tuition throughout the volunteering duration?” We then used market rates for tuition and financial literacy courses to calculate the estimated cost.

In FY17, our COP ran for 20 weeks, with 87 students participating. MYReaders ran for 21 weeks, for 16 students, while 8 Money & Me workshops were organised for 30 students. In total, we impacted 133 individuals, who collectively logged over 9,000 hours of tuition or financial literacy workshops.

Through the collective efforts of our volunteers, we were able to help the school and charity homes save a total of RM524,000 on tuition costs.