For this month’s CSR Profile, we’re shining the spotlight on Bupa, as told by Katie Panayi, Senior Internal Communications Manager.

Please provide a short outline of your current role and a brief description of any other relevant career experience:
I lead Bupa’s global communications on three of our strategic pillars – Customer, Transformation and Data. This can mean anything from writing stories for our 85,000 people across the world, to designing campaigns or delivering programmes that get people engaged with what Bupa is trying to achieve. Before discovering my love for communicating, I worked in a range of roles from customer experience to infrastructure outsourcing, I even had a brief stint as a barristers’ clerk.

I lead Bupa’s relationship with ELBA voluntarily, as CSR and community specifically is something I’m passionate about. I’m very lucky to work for an organisation that empowers and encourages people to get involved in things that they are passionate about, and that’s how I ended up here. We have teams that look after Community and CSR more broadly, and I work closely with them to make sure we’re working together towards our objectives.

Why is CSR important to your organisation?
Bupa is a purpose-led organisation: we have no shareholders, so our focus is wholly on helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives and making a better world. Making a better world was added more recently to recognise the role we need to play, not only in the health of our customers and our people, but also in the health of our planet. We know that that is more than just the looking after the environment, it’s about building healthier, happier, and more resilient communities.

We have Foundations in Spain, Australia and the UK, focused on investing in their local communities. Here in the UK, the Bupa Foundation has employee-led Community Committees, where our people have the power to make a real difference to the areas in which they live and work. Community Committees are groups of passionate employees who volunteer their time to source, lead and continue targeted community activity and grants in their local areas. We’re committed to being active contributors to communities that we are part of, making a positive impact on the people, organisations, and spaces that we co-inhabit. That’s where our partnership with ELBA comes in.

Which topics, themes or initiatives is your organisation currently focused on?
Each of our Community Committees have defined our own strategies which focus on the causes that resonate most with our local teams. In London, our overarching mission is to support the mental health and wellbeing of local communities. This takes many forms – from supporting young, vulnerable and/or marginalised people and promoting social mobility, to helping reduce homelessness, and looking after local green spaces so that people can enjoy them properly.

Through ELBA, we’ve been able to really get stuck into our mission. In partnership with our Bupa Foundation, we’ve been able to support initiatives that help reduce serious youth violence and knife crime, give aid to refugees that have arrived in the UK having fled terrible circumstances in their own countries and, most recently, we are giving hope to young students who have been excluded from mainstream education with a new mentoring pilot programme for Pupil Referral Units.

In addition to this, our people have volunteered their time to help develop young people and local community leaders through mentoring and coaching; we’ve been getting our hands dirty on the ground in local parks and green spaces; and we’ve donated time and gifts to the ELBA Toy Appeal which is my favourite date of the year.

What is the best part of your job?
Making a better world for everyone is what motivates me. I have met so many inspirational people through working with ELBA, and it’s through this partnership that I met Paul Leslie whilst speaking at a SHIFT25 event at City Hall and became a trustee at the amazing Rights and Equalities in Newham (REIN). On top of that, empowering and enabling my colleagues to get involved and have a positive impact on our local community is really the icing on the cake.