During Corporate Responsibility Week this year, AXA employees voted for their favorite social entrepreneur initiative featuring an innovative prevention solution to facilitate users’ everyday lives.
The big winner was Alcove, by British entrepreneur Hellen Bowey. Created in 2014, Alcove uses connected objects to ensure the safety of elderly and disabled people. The solution will benefit from a €50,000 grant from AXA and a three-phase implementation plan to be carried out jointly with our partner incubator, Impact Hub:
- Acceleration phase: one week during which Hellen will take part in several workshops and exchange ideas with AXA experts on how to improve her solution and scale it to AXA customers.
- Incubation phase: three months at Impact Hub to work on incorporating the solution into AXA services.
- Implementation phase: starting in November 2017, Hellen will pitch her solution to local AXA teams to define how the service will be rolled out within AXA entities.
Three AXA employees – Eleni Mitropoulou, from AXA Konzern AG in Germany, Naphat Tiraaporn from Krunghtai-AXA and Agra Pramudita from AXA Asset Management Indonesia – were selected to participate in the acceleration phase and already spent a week with Hellen in London.
ELENI MITROPOULOU
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY WEEK WINNER, AXA KONZERN AG
It’s even better than I expected. I could take part of a very inspiring experience and learn a lot visiting the impact hub and some of the social entrepreneurs they support. I love their way to make profit, and be useful to people by the use of technology to make their solution easier and more affordable. It’s really in line with our strategy at AXA.
Arthur Jeannin, a young marketing project manager at AXA France, will also lend support to Hellen and the Alcove project until the incubation phase is completed.
ARTHUR JEANNIN
AXA GRADUATE
The concept of the “acceleration week” teaches us to work in a very different way. You focus on a project and try to identify at the same time both blocking points and opportunities for improvement. It forces you to think differently about your daily working life and explore new ideas that could be of use in AXA and that we would not necessarily have thought of. A great experience!
Community action in 44 countries with record participation!
As in previous years, local actions focusing on the environment, society and health were carried out by many Group entities. A total of 59,153 Group employees, a figure up 15 percent from last year, took part in actions in 44 countries.
Teams in Colombia, Spain, and India organized activities to promote reforestation, while Japan and Greece devoted sessions to the prevention of natural disasters. In Portugal’s Lisbon region, teams took part in a giant beach clean-up.
Initiatives in favor of society in general were also organized, with road safety awareness workshops in Gabon, school renovations in Turkey and the distribution of free meals to people in need in Morocco.
Lastly, health was the topic of choice for many entities, including Indonesia, the United States and Italy, where workshops on health and well-being at work were organized.
Corporate Responsibility Week 2017 also saw members of the Management Committee join AXA Hearts in Action volunteers for a challenge organized by the non-profit association “Jaccède”, which specializes in infrastructure accessibility. Equipped with a phone and an application, teams spent an afternoon exploring the streets of Paris to take stock of public place accessibility for people with reduced mobility.
