“Many people talk about Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Philanthropy… I think it’s all about leadership: tackling the social and environmental issues of the day not because you have to, or because everyone else is doing it, but because you want to and you feel morally compelled to.”

Kevin Trapani

Corporate responsibility, a core part of our business strategy, commits us to be socially responsible in all of our business operations: balancing the needs and concerns of our customers, stakeholders, employees, and communities that we serve.

We are here to make a difference - by driving social change, returning benefits to communities, supporting social and economic progress and environmental sustainability, inspiring changes in the way we impact our world.

Being successful by doing great things in the right way is a core value of our corporate culture. We accept the responsibility to “build a better future” – not only for our shareholders but also for our customers, employees, business partners, community, nation and the wider world.

As you can read in the Social Audit & Community Support section of our 2005 Company Report , we gave away an amount of money in 2005 equal to about 33% of our pre-tax earnings. More important, those dollars supported people in need all across the globe: buying goats to allow rape victims on the African Continent – shunned from their villages – to make a new start; making loans to enable single mothers to start small businesses in East Timor; helping families to recover and rebuild in New Orleans; providing medical care for victims of the Tsunami; and helping to build a YMCA in an area blighted by the collapse of the textile industry in North Carolina.

Our employees, who spend 40 hours of their work time each year in service to the community, built houses for the working poor, tutored kids in homeless shelters, served meals at soup kitchens, shaved their heads to raise money for childhood cancer research and helped our communities in countless other ways. In fact, in 2005, nearly 100% of our employees either gave time in service to the community or contributed financially to support those less fortunate than we are. Most did both