We were involved in a wide range of community projects throughout the year. Here are some case studies that are typical of our approach:

Airport Skills Training Programme
This programme, in partnership with Harlow College, targets unemployed people and helps get them back into work. For full details please refer to the local economy section of this report.

Moped boost for young people
The BAA Communities Trust pledged a total of £50,000 over three years to the local charity Rainer’s ‘Z Bikes’ programme. This loans mopeds to young people who have genuine transport difficulties that prevents them from securing a vocational opportunity.

Local schools
We were pleased to support an extension to the school building at the Little Hallingbury Church of England School with a £10,000 contribution through the BAA Communities Trust. The Trust also contributed £10,000 to the fundraising effort of Broxbourne Church of England School for a new eco-friendly building.

Hockerill Anglo-European College in Bishop’s Stortford was another recipient of funds from the Trust. The school was granted £10,000 to help it update its theatre, important to supporting its status as a specialist school in Music and Languages. Finally, the Trust donated £10,000 to support the Helena Romanes school in Great Dumow’s in its successful bid for specialist school status in Humanities.

Global Exchange
This project, which the BAA Communities Trust supported with £39,000, saw nine students from Kenya and nine from the UK working together in the community as part of an international volunteering exchange programme. The students spent three months in each country and during each visit the group of students completed 6,000 hours of community work.

Employee volunteering
We encourage our employees to volunteer and fundraise in the local community, particularly in support of those areas in which they have a personal community interest. As part of this commitment we allow all our staff to take 48 working hours a year as paid leave to devote to this work. Each year BAA celebrates the work of these staff at our i-Volunteer awards and extra funding is donated to recognise particular achievements. We were very pleased to see four Stansted Airport staff among the top prize winners at the national awards in January 2007.

More details about the projects we have worked on can be found in the 'Community Matters' section of this website: www.stanstedairport.com/communitymatters

More on... community investment

Issues and approach
Our plans