Ernst & Young

By Paddy Moser, Assistant Director, Private Equity, Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young is committed to making a difference in our local communities through helping charities and individuals to achieve their potential. Central to delivering on this commitment is channelling our people’s expertise and time into charities. Excitingly, our relationship with PEF enables us to do just that, engage our people in meeting the needs of a range of charities.

Over the past nine months, our involvement has varied, but focused in two particular areas. We were first asked to help PEF with screening two potential German charities, as the foundation looked to expand its beneficiary charities to outside of the UK. This formed the penultimate part of PEF’s “filtering” of potential beneficiary charities.

For Eva, who helped on the work, the role was not dis-similar to the skills required in the “day-job” – but it opened eyes to some of the pressures felt by the charitable sector (of resource, of funding, of stakeholder management).

Our second significant involvement has involved placing one of our team on short term secondment with PEF, reviewing the current financial and operational reporting capabilities of many of the existing charities. This formed part of PEF’s approach to understanding and improving financial metrics across their supported charities, on their journey of quantifying the social impact and return of their donations.

Mark, who seconded into the role, spent time with a number of the charities and with PEF’s portfolio team. He added “Working with PEF was a fantastic opportunity to gain experience in the charitable sector and to use my commercial skillset to make a real contribution to the valuable work that PEF has undertaken. The experience allowed me to develop from both a professional and personal perspective and has further strengthened the relationship between PEF and Ernst & Young.” And, like many other organisations, we entered into PEF’s Day of Community Action and look forward to doing so again in the future.

John Harley, Ernst & Young's head of Private Equity in EMEIA, added "Our involvement with the Private Equity Foundation has, we believe, been one of great benefit. For our people, it offers a real opportunity to apply their skills in a different environment and to deliver on our responsibilities to our local community, which, in turn, we hope is of benefit (however small) to PEF and their supported charities. It is a relationship that we hope will continue to flourish in the future."

As a team, we have enjoyed our involvement with PEF and we hope that, in some small way, we have helped PEF and their charities.