Enriching Communities

The a2 Milk Company has developed a community support framework to guide how to engage, invest in, and give back to the communities in which it operates, act on relevant social issues, and contribute to other programmes that are aligned to the Company’s purpose and which employees are passionate about.

KidsCan is New Zealand’s leading charity dedicated to helping New Zealand children affected by poverty. The Child Poverty Monitor in New Zealand shows 11.3% of all children living in households in material hardship  regularly go without essentials.

The Company has recently become a major partner of KidsCan to help support low socio-economic early childhood education centres across New Zealand to provide children attending those centres with food, clothing, and health products. a2MC supports KidsCan’s belief that education is a child’s ticket out of poverty and that children struggle to learn when they are cold or hungry.

The Company is proud to partner with KidsCan, providing children with the essentials, to help them participate in learning and have the opportunity for a better future. 

The a2 Milk Company has supported Foodbank with fresh milk product donations in New South Wales and Victoria since 2015, scaling up support in times of heightened need.

In FY22, support was increased – providing a cash donation to support Foodbank’s School Breakfast Program. a2MC also donated a2 Milk® products to Foodbank through the National Donor Partnership.

The School Breakfast Program provides a healthy breakfast for school children who would otherwise go without, and delivers important benefits for the students across a broad range of physical and mental health outcomes, including energy levels and concentration.

Through this donation, the a2 Milk Company was able to support Foodbank to provide 47 schools in some of Australia’s most remote indigenous communities with access to the School Breakfast Program.

Cure Kids is the largest funder of child health research in New Zealand after the government. The a2 Milk Company was proud to support Cure Kids Professorial Chair, Andrew Day, in FY20 and FY21 to research digestive health for children, with a special focus on coeliac disease and irritable bowel disease. 

In FY21 and FY22, the Company also made a significant donation to Cure Kids’ Elliott-Caughey Fund, a fund created to recognise the co-founders of Cure Kids, emeritus Sir Professor Bob Elliott and Dr Ron Caughey. Sir Bob was passionate about conditions of inequity and preventable childhood illness, hence those conditions are a focus for this fund. This is a continuation of research support from a2MC into children’s health and nutrition.

About 25,000 babies born in China each year suffer from cleft lip palate. Corrective surgery can help to transform those children’s lives – but they cannot undergo surgery until they achieve the requisite “health standard”, which includes weight targets.

The Company partnered with Operation Smile during the year to provide corrective surgery expenses and nutrition products to 300 children suffering from cleft lip palate, before and after their operation.

With more than 6,000 medical volunteers from around the world, Operation Smile is one of the world’s largest volunteer-based not for profit organisations.

The a2 Milk Company has partnered with Feed the Children in the USA to help give struggling families the supplies they needed to send their children back to school with confidence.

With the increased hardship children and families have faced since the outbreak of COVID-19, it is estimated that 1 in 6 children in the USA suffer from food insecurity.

In August and September 2021, the Company donated cash to provide food and supplies to school children, giving children what they need to do and be their best.