Communities

• Drive economic and social change through skills training and innovation
• Support our communities when natural disasters strike
• Collaborate to aid those facing food poverty 

Our long-standing commitment to operating responsibly underpins the actions we are taking in our local communities. Our support is about more than just giving money to good causes – we aim to make sure we are making a real and sustainable difference through meaningful partnerships and leveraging our skills and resources to help others.

We have pledged to improve the lives of 30 million people through skills training, being there in times of natural disaster and improving food security. We do this not only through direct funding and working in partnership with expert organisations, but with our colleagues also sharing their time, skills and passion to address the social needs in their communities. Our guests are also given the opportunity to show their support, and in 2023 nearly 35 million points redeemed by our IHG One Reward Members were donated to benefit the efforts of our charitable partners around the world.

You can find out how we're supporting our communities on pages 23 to 27 of our Responsible Business Report.

Ensuring we meet our pledge relies on strong relationships with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community organisations across our regions, as well as collaboration with our guests, colleagues and owners.

Our strategic partnerships are hugely important to us and in all our community initiatives, we seek to work with experts in their chosen field who share our commitment for driving positive change and making a difference. Our aim is to forge strategic, multi-year and multi-faceted relationships and, where possible, support these in different ways, whether financially, through volunteering or in-kind.

Our collaborations span from local communities to across continents and regions. Whether it’s working with small organisations to meet specific challenges or developing larger partnerships to help solve broader issues. This approach allows us to address wide-ranging social challenges that require a consistent global strategy, while also considering specific local needs.

As we move towards our target of improving the lives of 30 million people, it’s important that we work to improve the quality and accuracy of the data we use to measure our contribution and ensure we that we remain focused on the areas where we can make the biggest difference.

Helping us do this is our membership of the Business for Societal Impact (B4SI), which sets the global standard for managing corporate community investment.

We recognise that being in the heart of our communities, our hotels are best placed to assess local needs and provide tailored support where it is needed, so we encourage and support the development of local partnerships in line with our policy and strategy for community investment.

We also provide our corporate colleagues with two days of paid volunteer leave to work with charities close to their hearts.

As a company we come together for the whole of September for IHG’s Giving for Good month, which sees colleagues volunteer and make a positive difference in their communities.

In 2023, thousands of colleagues took time to give back to our communities through Giving for Good activities and made a positive difference to over 248,000 lives globally. Events spanned nearly 80 countries and over 1,400 charity partnerships, with activities including giving clothes to housing shelters in Canada, raising money to provide clean water in Egypt and providing meals to low-income hospital patients in Mexico. Colleagues from across our four Kimpton hotels in Los Angeles in the US volunteered their time at the Los Angeles Food Bank preparing more than 4,000 meals and food packages for underprivileged and food insecure families.

Since 2018, corporate employees and hotel colleagues around the world have provided more than 415,000 acts of volunteer service.

The travel and tourism industry has long played a key role in economic growth and offers a variety of career paths at all levels. As economies recover from the impact of the pandemic over the next decade, we are passionate about ensuring our industry is at the heart of positive change, attracting and developing a new generation of talent and creating one in three new jobs worldwide.

Our IHG Academy® is aimed at increasing social mobility and building hospitality skills for the future. In 2023, our IHG Academy offerings saw more than 30,000 participants gain valuable employment and life skills, as the programme has grown to provide work experience, internships, apprenticeships and free online learning through our IHG Skills Academy, to users all around the world.

We are proud of being there for our communities in times of need, and with our support needed more than ever before, we’ve continued our work with a range of humanitarian aid partners globally to assist in their critical relief and recovery efforts.

In 2023, we supported 15 relief efforts around the globe, responding to several natural disasters, from the earthquake in Turkey and Syria to the hurricanes in Mexico, and worked closely with charity relief experts CARE International and the American Red Cross. Alongside our annual donations to support its work on multiple fronts, we also assisted the American Red Cross in its recovery efforts following the destruction caused by the devastating wildfires in Hawaii.

We also activated the IHG Colleague Disaster Relief Assistance Fund to support colleagues needing food and safe and secure living conditions following natural disasters, including those affected by typhoon Mawar on the island of Guam.

Food security is a long-standing critical challenge facing many parts of the world, but the impact of the pandemic, supply chain issues and inflation have exacerbated the challenge in many markets. With increasing jobs lost and the fragility of food supply, the charity Action Against Hunger estimates that more than 800 million people are currently going hungry globally.

Our support of the Global FoodBanking Network contributes to its food bank and food provision charities in nearly 50 countries. We also expanded our work with Green Food Bank, the official branch of Global FoodBanking Network in China. Also, following the success of our work with food rescue organisation Goodr in the US, 2023 saw us begin working with Olio in the UK.