Strong communities are the foundation of a thriving and resilient society. As a brand rooted in the towns and cities we serve, we see first-hand the difference that can be made through our community partnerships.
Through our long-standing charity partnerships, Sparks loyalty scheme, community programmes and the energy of our colleagues in stores, we use our scale, platforms and people to make a meaningful difference in the places we serve. That’s why together with our community partners we are committed to raising £20 million for good causes by 2030 and through Plan A for Brighter Futures to support 1 million people to realise the magic of their potential.
M&S x YoungMinds
Young people's mental health is one of the defining issues of our time, and our headline charity partnership reflects what our customers and colleagues care about most.
YoungMinds is the UK's leading charity for young people's mental health. When we launched our partnership in 2023, we set an ambitious goal to raise £5 million over three years to help YoungMinds support 7 million young people and the adults in their lives. Thanks to the generosity of our customers and colleagues, we achieved that target a full year ahead of schedule, and we have committed to raising a further £1.5 million to fund a full year of parent and carer support services.
Our support has already reached over 9 million young people, through digital advice, information resources and expanded helpline capacity. In the last year alone, the YoungMinds Parents Helpline supported 14,000 parents and carers. Our partnership spans fundraising, our "Buddy Benches" in schools across the UK, and our annual Young Designer Competition, in which over 8,300 young people aged 5 to 16 entered designs in support of YoungMinds' Hello Yellow campaign, with profits from a hoodie, sweatshirt and two t-shirts going directly to the charity.
Local engagement
Being a good neighbour is built into how we run our stores. When colleagues fundraise, volunteer and redistribute food in their local areas, M&S becomes part of the everyday fabric of the communities we serve.
Many of our colleagues are active members of their local communities and want to support causes close to where they live and work, and our community programme is built around the range of ways colleagues can take action locally:
Each of our stores can select one local charity to fundraise for across the year. We also offer payroll giving and matched funding to colleagues, so colleagues can amplify their personal giving alongside the activity of their store.
Letting each store choose its own local charity means our fundraising reflects the priorities of the community it serves, not a single national list.
We know how important community involvement is to our colleagues, so every colleague is entitled to one day of paid leave per year to volunteer at the organisation of their choice. We also run company-wide volunteer weeks, with thousands of colleagues volunteering with hundreds of community organisations across the country. Projects range from organising tea parties for local elderly people, to revamping community gardens. They also engage in school tours, school talks and wider town-centre engagement.
Surplus food at the end of the day should feed someone, not the bin. Our partnership with Neighbourly turns daily store activity into hundreds of millions of meals for people who need them.
We work with Neighbourly to link our stores with a network of over 3,000 community partners that collect daily donations of surplus food, including fresh fruit and vegetables, grocery items and bakery goods. Since the partnership began in 2015, we have donated the equivalent of 101.1 million meals to people in need.
Working closely with our stores and Neighbourly, we have achieved 99% distribution coverage across our stores and continue to identify any gaps in coverage by ensuring each store is paired with at least two good causes. Where this is not possible, we use Neighbourly's "Surplus Saviours" initiative, the first scheme of its kind we have adopted, which connects our late-closing and harder-to-reach stores with community-focused individuals who collect donations of unsold food for local redistribution.
Across the M&S international business, our partners are active in supporting their local communities, including in India, the Czech Republic and Greece, and across our wider franchise partner network.
As part of the King's Coronation Food Project, we joined forces with Alliance Food Sourcing and other UK retailers to support FareShare, the charity fighting hunger and food waste. For one week, customers could donate at the till, raising vital funds and helping divert surplus food from suppliers and manufacturers to the people who need it most. This campaign complemented the redistribution work we deliver every day through our partnership with Neighbourly.
Charity partnerships
Long-term charity partnerships working on the issues our customers and colleagues care about let M&S do more than write cheques: they bring product, platform and people together to deliver outcomes that last.
We collaborate with charities to address a range of social challenges, with partnerships shaped to deliver financial donations, product innovation, employee engagement, volunteering and awareness-raising campaigns.
Our key charity partnerships include:
More than two decades of partnership with Breast Cancer Now means our work goes beyond fundraising, it is built into the products women rely on through diagnosis, treatment and recovery.
Breast Cancer Now is the UK's largest breast cancer charity. It funds critical research and works towards a clear ambition: that no woman dies from breast cancer by 2050 or sooner. Together, we have developed our specialist post-surgery lingerie range, designed with Breast Cancer Now's clinical insight to help women feel comfortable, confident and supported as they rest and recover. Through product sales and employee and customer fundraising, we have raised £33.6m for the charity to date.
Our partnership recognises the everyday support members of the Armed Forces community need, from serving personnel and veterans to their families.
The Royal British Legion sits at the heart of a national network supporting our Armed Forces community. For more than 100 years, the charity has provided support to serving and ex-serving personnel and their families. Together with the Royal British Legion, M&S has supported services such as Admiral Nurses, who care for members of the Armed Forces community living with dementia, and their families. The Poppy Collection has been removed from the website per the M&S team, as we no longer sell the range]
In 2025 we joined the Royal British Legion to mark VE Day 80, connecting the Armed Forces community together with our customers and colleagues across the country. We also continue to welcome Royal British Legion volunteers in our stores and forecourts to sell paper poppies every Remembrance.
A safe home is the foundation everything else in life builds on, and when that foundation cracks, Shelter’s free helpline is often the place people turn.
Shelter exists to defend the right to a safe home. The charity provides advice and support for people facing housing issues and homelessness, funds research, and campaigns for systemic change. We have partnered with Shelter since 2005, raising funds through a range of activities including our Festive Food-on-the-Move range, our Sparks partnership and clothing-sample donations, contributing to the cost of Shelter's free national helpline. In the past year, our Festive Food-on-the-Move range alone raised £868,000 for Shelter, supporting people at risk of homelessness.
Bowel cancer is one of the UK's most common cancers, but survival rates soar when it's caught early. Bowel Cancer UK's Get On A Roll campaign puts that message in front of the people who need it.
We are proud to support Bowel Cancer UK’s Get On A Roll campaign, raising awareness of bowel cancer symptoms and the importance of early screening.
Sparks partnerships
Sparks turns everyday shopping into a force for good, channelling customer giving at the scale only a major retailer can deliver.
Every time a customer shops with Sparks, our customer loyalty scheme, we donate 1p to a charity of their choice.
Our 37 Sparks partners span four themes: children and young people, health and wellbeing, social inclusion, and environment, wildlife and animals. In 2025 we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of Sparks, and since launch, our customers have helped donate more than £19.2 million to our charity partners since 2015.
Responding to emergencies
When events affect our customers, colleagues and communities at scale, M&S has the range, the logistics network and the goodwill of customers to act quickly and meaningfully.
We respond to emergencies using our scale and expertise to support communities through events that affect our customers and our colleagues.
Our pandemic response showed how quickly M&S, our customers and our colleagues can mobilise when frontline communities need support.
We raised over £8.4 million for NHS Charities Together during the pandemic, through a donation from our Rainbow Sale, our "All in this Together" T-shirts and rainbow bags. NHS Charities Together works with a network of over 24 NHS charities across the UK to provide the extra support needed to care for NHS staff, patients and communities. We also helped to kick-start the Neighbourly Community Fund to support local communities with much-needed grants.
In response to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, we acted quickly to support NGOs providing aid to those affected by the war. Beyond financial donations, our customers, colleagues and supply chain came together to help people displaced by conflict. M&S offered a £1.5 million package of support, including a £500,000 donation to UNHCR, 12,000 coats and jackets provided through UNHCR, and £500,000 made available to match colleague fundraising for UNICEF. Colleagues raised over £130,000, and customer donations in store and online raised more than £1.9 million for UNICEF.