Corporate Social Responsibility

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ABL Group’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) charter goes hand-in-hand with our overall sustainability and ESG initiative to help drive positive impacts from our business practices on the people and communities around us, our wider planet, the profits we generate, and our Group company purpose – driving sustainability in energy and oceans.

As part of our charter, ABL Group has a CSR steering committee dedicated to defining and implementing a single Group company CSR strategy across our global footprint. This strategy is aligned with who we are as an organisation, both globally and regionally, our purpose, and our values.

To define that strategy, we identified three key pillars of our CSR:

Environmental

Economic

Why is our CSR so key to us?

As a global business, we have a responsibility to the societies in which we exist. It is not only the right thing to do, but our CSR runs through the core of who we are and what we strive to be as an organisation – driving the economic, environmental and social sustainability of the sectors and communities in which we work and live.

We also recognise the benefits to our colleagues that a global CSR programme provides – allowing us to champion causes that are dear to our professional and personal lives, encouraging colleagues to lend their time and expertise to support people and groups beyond work, and above all, promoting among our teams the value of care, kindness, and compassion wherever we are in the world.

How we define our CSR Strategy

ABL Group’s CSR strategy is focused along four key pillars that reflect our company’s values and the causes close to our heart:

1. Volunteering

Many of our teams globally are involved in volunteering activities to support local charities or causes that resonate either with the local office or our wider Group ESG charter. Examples include coastal clean-up days, team volunteering for poverty-relief and children-related charities, as well as supporting seafarer charities like the Mission to Seafarers – a cause which has long held resonance to the Group, given the significant number of ex-seafarers among our staff.

2. Fundraising

Teams and individuals across the Group, frequently partake in fundraising activities for charities that are aligned with a Group company, an office or the Group as a whole. These include fundraising races or other sporting activities for Cancer awareness charities, environmental charities, and those supporting children. Fundraising is always proactively encouraged and endorsed across the Group, whether undertaken by individuals or teams.

3. Stem Outreach

Staying true to one of our five company values for Technical Excellence, at ABL Group, we actively encourage contributing to STEM education outreach (science, technical engineering and mathematics) programmes. These may include lecturing at universities or schools, partnering and mentoring local educational institutions across engineering and marine disciplines, hosting school-age children for workshops and internships at our offices, and more.

We strongly believe in our responsibility to support and nurture talent from wherever it may come to drive the future of our industries.

4. Charity Alignment

ABL Group has long supported many different charities covering a variety of causes that speak to who we are as a Group – seafaring charities, cancer awareness, environmental causes, educational and engineering programmes, poverty relief and children-related causes. We passionately believe in our shared responsibility to the communities in which we work, live, and have grown up.

Discussing the impact of one of ABL Group’s many volunteering activities, supporting a South London-based charity, ‘Good Food Matters’ – in collaboration with Business Volunteers – a professional partner in sourcing and managing CSR volunteer days for corporate partners.

“It was good to do something completely different for a day with colleagues from across the business. Fresh air, physical exercise and really good fun whilst knowing that you are doing something to help a good cause.”
Amy Barker, Graduate Engineer ABL Group

Our CSR highlights

Rolled out first group-wide survey measuring CSR awareness and where colleagues’ charitable interests lie.

>90% of employees rate CSR as important – completely necessary to our Group sustainability.

Fundraising initiatives taking place globally, including the annual Odyseea – race against breast cancer in France.

ABL Group is a signatory of the Neptune Declaration on Seafarer Wellbeing and Crew Change.

Partner in several educational mentorship schemes worldwide, including Capital Filles – dedicated to fighting gender and social inequality in higher education, from school age.