Responsible business

Responsible citizen

We strive to be a responsible member of our community and influence positive change​

We contribute to our broader community through philanthropic and cultural partnerships, via the Columbia Threadneedle Foundation. We are committed to managing our environmental footprint, to ensure we understand, measure and manage the environmental impacts resulting from our business activities. We are also cognisant of our responsibility to support a sustainable supply chain.
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Columbia Threadneedle Foundation

We see corporate philanthropy as investment in the future. Columbia Threadneedle Foundation invests in selected charities via multi-year, engaged partnerships – an approach which we believe not only delivers measurable improvement to individual lives, but will bring long-term benefit to the broader community by helping to address critical social issues and drive lasting social change.

When selecting our charity partners, we look for sustainable growth potential supported by experienced management and leadership, with clear strategic vision. We seek to build long-term collaborative partnerships where we provide both funding and active support in the form of management and employee involvement. We have a thematic focus on charities that use education, art and sport to engender social change.

The work of Columbia Threadneedle Foundation builds on Ameriprise Financial’s 120 year history of community support and commitment to organisations whose shared goal is to improve the lives of individuals from all walks of life.

Environmental Management

Our employee-led Environmental Advisory Group (EAG) focuses on identifying, measuring and reducing the major environmental impacts resulting from our business activities, internally and in the wider community. These major impacts consist of travel, waste and usage of energy, water and raw materials.

Columbia Threadneedle recognises the importance of environmental stewardship and maintains an Environmental Management System (EMS) to ensure measurable and auditable data is accurately maintained for all our major environmental impacts and since 2007 has achieved continuous ISO14001:2015 accreditation.

Recent EMS achievements:

  • The development and delivery of a recycling behavioural change campaign. This included the installation of new colour-coded recycling bins with clear labelling, and an animated campaign encouraging the correct separation of waste.
  • Information sharing on ways to reduce sustainability impacts for home workers.
  • A decrease in carbon emissions largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic that resulted in less business travel and energy use in offices. We are using these findings and many of the outcomes from changing work practices to continue minimising emissions.

Responding to climate change

As a large global asset manager, we are committed to both delivering long-term financial returns for clients, which includes managing the risks and opportunities presented by climate change and supporting a constructive transition to a low-carbon economy.

Read more in our global report Climate change: managing risks and opportunities – Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).