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We believe that education is an essential right for all boys and girls and we’ve been striving for years to ensure that younger generations have – through school education – equal opportunities to develop their ability, quality, and talent, regardless of where they live.
This led to the launch in 2020 of Bolton Hope, Bolton Group’s Foundation working to guarantee the right to have quality education for all children.
Today the Bolton Hope Foundation leads the collaboration with Save the Children, an important ally with which we operate since 2013 with the common goal of fighting educational poverty and guaranteeing the right to education for all children, in all countries.
This commitment has allowed us to reach, since the beginning of the partnership, more than 25,000 children and young people in Italy and around the world, who have thus been able to benefit from a quality education.
In Italy, in particular, Bolton Hope continues to support Fuoriclasse, the Save the Children project designed to fight school dropout through a range of educational and motivational initiatives.
The project runs across 31 schools in Milan, Bari, Turin, and Aprilia. Since 2013, thanks to our contribution, 15,000 children have been able to benefit, including 4,593 in the 2019/20 school year alone.
Furthermore, in 2020, to respond to the serious challenges posed by the pandemic for the education of our young people, we stepped up our collaboration with Save the Children by supporting the Spazi Futuro [Future Spaces] project.
This involved the creation of 90 spaces designed to host art and recreational workshops, with facilities for playing and practicing motor activities, reading, and studying in disadvantaged neighbourhoods throughout Italy. We also supported Arcipelago Educativo [Educational Archipelago], a project designed to reduce learning loss. In total, we were able to support over 2,500 children and teenagers through these two projects.
In line with our commitment to education, we also joined Bocconi University’s campaign “Una sfida possible”.
Through the Bolton Group Scholar project, six students from the two-year degree course in Marketing Management and one from the Masters in Green Management, Energy and Corporate Social Responsibility, have benefited from a scholarship provided by Bolton Group.
Inspired by this vision, we support environmental education projects using our brands, because we believe it’s vital that we engage with young people directly to promote environmental education and awareness, with the ultimate aim of protecting our natural resources.
Together for the Oceans
Ondina is the star of Insieme per gli Oceani [Together for the Oceans], the project from Rio Mare and WWF which aims to convey the importance of the oceans and raise awareness among younger generations about the challenge of protecting the marine ecosystem. In 2020, when the new school year got underway, we brought the story of Ondina, The Girl and the Ocean, into over 3,000 elementary schools across Italy, with participation from over 100,000 children between the ages of seven and ten.
The project is designed to be an entertaining way of raising awareness about sustainability, through cross-discipline teaching programs that show children the need to respect the fragile, threatened marine environment. La Feltrinelli stores in Milan, Genoa, Naples, Bari, Rome, and Florence got involved in the Insieme per gli Oceani project, organizing several workshops for children to learn about Ondina.
UHU Eco-Schools
Staying on the subject of environmental education, through our brand UHU we support Eco-Schools, an international certification program coordinated by the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE).
The schools involved in the project promote sustainability and environmental awareness through special projects and workshops. In Portugal, for example, 1,825 institutions signed up for the Eco-Schools program, for a total of over 800,000 students.
We worked with a number of schools to organise the UHU Challenge, an initiative that uses products from the UHU ReNature range to raise awareness about sustainable consumption and the need to preserve biodiversity.
During the 2020/21 academic year, over 100,000 students took part in the initiative.
