London—Dentons has been named one of the top ten community investors in the UK in the inaugural GivX Community Value Awards for 2017, a new annual index of corporate giving. The awards ceremony was held in the City of London yesterday.

Dentons leads a cohort of companies that are pioneering best practice in CSR. The Firm was commended for its particularly strong performance in volunteering, placing in the top five for both its total volunteering score and overall volunteering contribution per employee. The top-25 winners at the awards also included UK giants ITV, HSBC and John Lewis.

The free-to-use GivX framework, developed by the pre-eminent social enterprise Benefacto, allows companies and organisations to simply and effectively measure their community investment, and enables companies to benchmark six different areas of their community investment programme against others. Donations, fundraising and volunteering work are made comparable in terms of the ‘Community Value’ a company has created, defined as the replacement cost the charity would have to pay if it were to purchase similar goods or services on the open market.

Jeremy Cohen, Dentons Chief Executive Officer for the UK and Middle East, said, “We are very proud to be recognised as a leading firm for the positive impact we create in the wider community. Giving back to society through volunteering and charity fundraising is something that we take very seriously as a firm, with a particular example being our award-winning Poplaw Legal Advice Clinic, for which Dentons' lawyers have provided over 13,000 hours of free legal advice to the residents of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. In addition, our lawyers provide pro bono legal advice to projects such as Fair Finance and the Children's Air Ambulance and our staff contribute countless hours volunteering in schools and other community projects."

Ben Darlington of Benefacto added, “The principle behind the GivX framework is one of simplifying CSR measurements to make it easier for businesses and organisations to measure their contribution to the community and then communicate it. Our inaugural awards were to celebrate an innovative group of companies, who by pioneering the framework, are committing to transparently and effectively reporting their change-making community investment programmes."

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