Charity & community funding
Donations
Cash
We make donations to charitable organisations through our local stores. They each have a small, limited budget and focus their support towards issues that are important to their local community.
Stores are not able to support:
- personal appeals on behalf of individual people, including overseas trips;
- advertising or goodwill messages;
- political parties;
- third party fundraising on behalf of a charity;
- religious bodies, except where the project provides non-denominational, non-sectarian support for the benefit of the general project; and
- supplying clothing, other than in exceptional circumstances, as we already give clothes to Newlife and Shelter.
Clothing and equipment
Centrally we donate returned clothing and business surplus to the charity Newlife. Newlife funds medical research, nurse support and awareness campapigns and vital equipment for disabled and terminally ill children.
Click here for more information on the work that Newlife carry out.
M&S donates returned clothing and business surplus to them and the money rasied from the sale and recycling of the garments directly funds 400 pieces of equipment for disabled children each year
Donations of clothing samples are sent to Shelter; they are one of our charity partners and support the homeless.
Occasionally our stores may donate unwanted sales floor fittings or garments taken back as goodwill exchanges to local charity shops.
Food
We aim to donate our date-expired food to charitable organisations. Our first choice to receive the donations is FareShare, a community food network that redistributes surplus food from the food industry to vulnerable people in the community.
The food manager in each local store manages this process – if you want to find out more please contact your local store.
Christmas cards
Please note we do not accept bids to be the recipient of funds from our Christmas cards, we select the charities each year from our existing corporate partnerships
To find out more about the many other things we do to support the community, go to our Plan A website (opens in a new window) >>
Fundraising
We allow fundraising to take place on our store sales floors only when it is part of a corporate campaign for one of our charity partners, for example Breakthrough Breast Cancer.
Major disasters
Before we make any commitment to supporting a major disaster, we consider the real needs, the requests from our customers and employees and whether the disaster has occurred in a region of the world where we have strong links either through our stores, offices or suppliers. We decide what we will do for each major disaster on an individual basis.
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