Our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agenda and initiatives aim to boost the bank’s perception to be a socially-minded enabler, a reliable partner, and a catalyst for change. They also help to build trust, employee and client loyalty, and strengthen our reputation – thus indirectly mitigating other material risks. We have been working for a better future since the early 20th century. In the last decade, we consistently reviewed and strengthened our initiatives, making them more strategic and focused around our education, enterprise, and community pillars. This improves the impact of our CSR investments along recognized theory of change models. Indicators for 2017 show that we are on the right track: We were able to reach almost 5.2 million people, 2.1 million with our CSR programs, 3.1 million with our Arts, Culture & Sports projects. We invested € 64.2 million in these initiatives, while 17,417 employees (22% of Deutsche Bank staff, excluding Postbank) took an active role as corporate volunteers.
The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a plan of action to shift the world to a more sustainable and resilient path. Our CSR initiatives contribute to this global effort, focusing on supporting specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): With our Born to Be initiatives, we contribute to goals 4 (quality education) and 5 (gender equality), which aim to ensure an inclusive and equitable quality education and empower women and girls who tend to be more marginalized. Social entrepreneurs who are supported through our Made for Good program contribute predominantly to goal 8 (decent work and economic growth). Our community development initiatives and the Urban Age project support goal 11 (sustainable cities and communities).
SDG goal 17 (partnerships for the goals) is addressed holistically through our partnerships with key stakeholders, advocacy groups, or non-profit organizations such as the London Benchmarking Group, the Centre for Social Justice in the UK, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy in the US, and PHINEO in Germany to tackle societal challenges. We also support socio-political research projects such as the global expert poll to identify the “Best Countries to be a Social Entrepreneur”, or the joint survey by New York University and the Youth Development Institute on progress made in Mexican communities in the US. This is how we create shared value and promote social return on investment (SROI) analyses, targeted impact measurements, and cross-sector benchmarking.