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Penguin Random House UK publishes first Creative Responsibility report

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Penguin Random House UK has published its first Creative Responsibility Report. Designed by a former winner of our Student Design Award, this report sets out an overview of the progress we have made towards our mission to bridge the UK’s creativity gap.

The creativity gap is rooted in the UK's unequal society, and means not everyone has an equal opportunity to meet their creative potential. At Penguin Random House UK we believe that creativity matters to society. Creative people invent, imagine, and solve problems, big and small. We all need to be more and more creative to tackle the challenges posed by today’s economy and society - at work, at school, at home and in our communities.

To achieve this mission we've set ourselves a number of ambitious goals to 2020 under four priority areas – Reading, Community, Inclusion and Sustainability. In this report we set out an overview of the progress we made towards these goals in 2016.

Last year saw more than 400 colleagues – nearly a quarter of our UK workforce – actively involved in Creative Responsibility. Some of the highlights from 2016 include:

  • Giving 130,000 pupils access to our free library of e-books through Through Read for My School, a national reading competition for Years 3-8 for schools across England
  • Supporting 75 students struggling with their reading each week at primary schools local to our UK sites
  • Volunteering over 500 days of staff time including trained writing mentor placements with creative writing charity Ministry of Stories
  • Donating nearly 90,000 books to charities including BookAid International, Prison Reading Groups and to communities across the UK through World Book Night
  • Launching WriteNow which welcomed 150 writers from under-represented communities to an insight day, with 96% of participants saying the experience increased their confidence as a writer. 12 exceptional writers were taken forward onto a year-long WriteNow mentoring programme
  • Removing the need for a University degree from all jobs and introducing publishing as a career option to 150 young people at #PRHJobHack events across the country
  • Sourcing 93% of paper from sustainable (FSC certified) sources
  • Measuring our carbon footprint for the first time, from paper mill to bookshop

To find out more about our Creative Responsibility goals and all the different things we are doing to meet them, you can read the full report here.

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