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Community partnerships

We support a wide range of health and education initiatives in the communities where we operate. Donations are made centrally and by GSK sites to support local charities and good causes.

Below are just a few examples of the many community partnerships we supported in our four main regions during 2004.

Europe
Barretstown in Ireland and L’Envol in France are residential camps where seriously ill children can have fun and develop their self confidence. GSK gave £250,000 ($458,000) and £100,000 ($183,000) respectively, to support the camps in 2004. Employees also give their time to Barretstown and L’Envol – with over 40 GSK employees participating in 2004.

Three new European programmes were launched, each receiving a grant of £300,000 ($549,000) over three years. These were:

• Change in Advance, a disease prevention programme that promotes healthy eating and exercise, aimed at Slovakian children living on urban housing estates;
• a programme in Spain that provides healthcare for homeless and abandoned children;
• Multi Coloured Lives, an interactive education programme to help children with disabilities integrate into Russian society.

International
GSK contributed £100,000 ($183,000) to the Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) initiative in Ethiopia, in partnership with WHO and UNICEF. IMCI aims to reduce childhood deaths from preventable and treatable conditions such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and malnutrition. It helps families to improve the health of their children through better nutrition and healthcare.

In Vietnam GSK is supporting the ‘500 Ethnic Midwives’ initiative with $335,000 ($183,000) in funding. The funding is being used to build a training centre where 500 women from Vietnam’s ethnic minority groups will become trained midwives. People from ethnic communities often live in poor rural areas where there is little access to healthcare services. The new midwives will play an important role helping to improve mother and child health in their home towns.

UK
GSK supports over 70 charitable organisations in the UK. In 2004 this included over £500,000 ($915,000) to support medical research undertaken by the charities Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Cystic Fibrosis Trust, DEBRA, Ehlers-Danlos Support Group and the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

A GSK grant of £386,000 ($706,000) over two years will support the British Lung Foundation’s Baby Breathe Easy programme. It will fund a pilot scheme which will be run in nine regions across the UK supporting parents and carers of young babies and children under five in dealing with diagnosed and undiagnosed recurring chest problems.

US
GSK is donating $350,000 (£191,000) over three years to the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health. The Institute provides health education for low-income neighbourhoods in non-traditional venues, including African American and Afro-Caribbean churches, barber shops, beauty salons, laundromats and tattoo parlours. It provides information in English and Spanish to help promote early disease detection and encourage people in multi-ethnic communities to adopt healthier lifestyles.

We continued our support for the Children’s Health Fund’s Referral Management Initiative (RMI). A three-year grant of more than $2 million (£1.1 million) is helping the RMI expand into seven US states, helping high-risk and homeless children receive the specialist medical care they need.

Foundations
GSK does not operate a single charitable foundation for its community investment programmes but has a number of small country-based foundations in Canada, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Romania, Spain, and North Carolina in the US. Our local foundations support a wide range of charities and healthcare initiatives.

Over the last six years, the GSK France Foundation has supported a number of programmes in 12 African countries and Cambodia to improve HIV/AIDS prevention education, training and care. By 2005 over 270,000 people are expected to have benefited.

The GSK Foundation in Canada focuses much of its support on hospice care helping terminally ill patients and their families. The Foundation is also supporting community programmes in Africa, including the extension of the PHASE project into Uganda.

The North Carolina GSK Foundation in the USA is an endowed, self-funding organisation. It supports initiatives in the areas of mathematics, science and health education in North Carolina. In 2004, this Foundation awarded grants totalling $2.8 million (£1.5 million).

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