Supporting our local communities
Collaborating to drive lasting change
Our long-standing commitment to social impact continued to make a significant difference this year, empowering communities across the UK. Through strategic partnerships and dedicated volunteering, we helped foster positive change, addressing critical societal needs.
Our efforts spanned from inspiring young minds to strengthening local charities and making the festive season more meaningful. Here are a few of these stories that share the connection our people forge with the communities in which they work.
Debating tomorrow
Find out how students supported by Debate Mate inspired Deloitte partners with creative solutions for a tech-driven world.
Inspiring future leaders: The power of debate
Our collaboration with Debate Mate, a charity dedicated to teaching debating skills to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, brought together 140 schoolchildren and our senior leaders from SRTA (Strategy, Risk & Transactions Advisory) for a truly inspiring event.
The challenge posed to these bright young minds was: “How can we lead healthier lifestyles in an increasingly tech-driven world?” This unique intergenerational event took our partners completely out of their comfort zones, fostering fresh thinking and diverse perspectives.
The students, representing a range of London schools, pitched more than 60 fantastic ideas with remarkable clarity and creativity to our SRTA partners. Among their innovative proposals were ‘tech gardens’ combining green outdoor spaces with digital tools, policies to influence how we should embrace AI while protecting career opportunities for young people, a tax on companies for their use of AI with proceeds used to reskill workers, and even generating energy from kinetic movement in shoes to power evolving technology.
The students were incredibly articulate and presented brilliantly, bringing fresh perspectives that provided our partners with considerable food for thought. In turn, the students benefitted from our coaching, support, and encouragement which helped them build confidence and critical thinking skills. This experience, we hope, will support them as they prepare for their next steps in education or on their professional journeys.
Catalysing growth and impact for local charities
Across the country, we actively support our people in building strong community connections and making a positive impact. One way in which this is delivered is through local charity partnerships, a three-year programme that connects each of Deloitte UK’s offices with local charities.
Together with Pilotlight, Deloitte launched an innovative two-phased programme to identify and engage our next cohort of local charities. Mindful that charities are time strapped and sometimes are required to endure a lengthy process to secure new corporate partnerships, our collaboration with Pilotlight ensured the process was designed to minimise the impact on their time.
The selection process, managed by Pilotlight, focused on identifying and recruiting the charity partners. Our employees actively participated, voting for their office’s partner, ensuring genuine local engagement. Pilotlight’s deep sector knowledge and trusted relationships with grassroots charities across the country ensured an efficient and robust selection process. They helped in assessing charities against co-designed criteria aligned to Deloitte’s strategic social impact focus areas: skills, digital, and sustainability.
Once we had selected our charities, it was key that they immediately felt the benefit of our support. Our colleagues attended a volunteering initiative either in-person or virtually. Facilitated by Pilotlight, these full-day sessions brought diverse Deloitte teams together. The teams then brainstormed solutions for critical operational challenges faced by our charity partners, including income generation, marketing, and operational efficiency.
These programmes were guided by five core principles: ensuring efficient resource management, encouraging diverse perspectives, unlocking participant potential, valuing every contribution, and fostering effective collaboration to deliver optimal outcomes for both participants and charities.
With more than 480 Deloitte volunteers contributing over 3,100 hours, charities received vital, practical solutions and guidance, enhancing their resilience and improving service delivery to their beneficiaries. The tangible impact was clear: 98% of participants and 100% of charities expressed satisfaction with the programme's effectiveness and the support provided.
This partnership with Pilotlight not only simplified the engagement process for charities but also effectively showcased how combining corporate expertise with sector knowledge can drive meaningful social change.
"We would never have had the resources to source and secure a corporate partnership of this value completely on our own."
- Double Impact, Nottingham office charity partner, Pilotlight programme attendee
From a season of gifting to a season of doing good
As Christmas 2025 approached, Deloitte colleagues across our offices embraced a powerful social impact festive campaign to support local communities at a time when they need it most. From London to Belfast, hundreds of volunteers engaged in meaningful initiatives, transforming the festive season into a period of tangible social impact.
Our flagship initiative involved launching a new volunteering partnership with Trussell, the anti-poverty charity and the UK's largest comunity of food banks. As part of this, we also made a corporate donation to the charity. Our volunteers packed more than 18,000 hygiene kits – essential items that provide dignity to people facing hardship, in what became Trussell’s largest ever corporate packing challenge.
We also updated our popular ‘Ethical Gift Guide’, encouraging colleagues and external audiences to gift purposeful presents during the gifting season. This guide, packed with presents from charities and social enterprises, offered unique, ethical, sustainable gifts like wild bird nesters, plant-based phone covers, or supporting refugees through cooking.
Our local charity partners benefitted from diverse activities held in our individual offices, each activity aimed at supporting their communities. These ranged from lively Christmas raffles and 10K runs to colleagues socialising with elderly hospital patients, setting up charity parties, and even tree planting. Beyond these direct efforts, donation drives collected essential items for key charities such as Trussell (food bank), Scope (disability equality charity), Smart Works (employment charity), and Little Village (baby bank). Additionally, our Working Families Network’s London Christmas party also served as a donation point for Little Village, raising £2,475 for the charity.
At the end of this season of giving, the campaign's success was clear: 98% of volunteers said that taking part supported their wellbeing and made them feel empowered to be a part of Deloitte’s commitment to social impact. This festive initiative not only made a difference to local communities but also positively impacted our colleagues.
