At Your Side: Brother Goes Bigger, With Further Donations for Bushfire Support

With the bushfire crisis still raging, Brother International Australia have decided to escalate their CSR support by donating a further $103,000 to Australian charities (both locally and nationally), since donating $10,000 to the Red Cross last December.

Australia has seen more than 10 million hectares of land destroyed by bushfires this season, and with homes burnt down, homes lost, and wildlife killed en-masse, it’s important for the corporate community to band together, and give to those in need. Brother have decided to take a particular focus on assisting Australia’s native wildlife by allocating over 60% of their upcoming donation to charities that are helping Koalas and other animals who have been majorly impacted by the fires.

“The koala population has taken a real hit after the fires killed approximately 1/3 of the species. This number is astronomical”, says Alex Rodriguez, CSR & Compliance Manager at Brother.

“These are native mammals of our country, and we need to do what we can to protect them, especially because they are extremely vulnerable. As slow-moving animals who eat and live in eucalyptus trees, which are highly flammable, they can’t escape the fires easily, so we are seeing the death toll continuing to rise drastically”.

Of the $103,000, Brother plan to allocate donations of $20,000 to each of the following charities; St Vincent De Paul Society, Foodbank, Wires, Australian Koala Foundation, and Koala Hospital. In addition to this, a further $3,000 will be donated to the Taronga Conservation Society, in support of Brother Industries of Japan’s sister city partnership with Nagoya’s Higashiyama Zoo who have a long-standing relationship in koala conservation.

Sticking true to the company motto, ‘At Your Side’, the team at Brother have also decided to take initiative internally, by raising funds through staff donations. Impressed and grateful for their staff’s initiative (with over $2,000 already raised), Brother will also match staff donations from September 2019 until the end of February 2020.