OREANDA-NEWS. January 11, 2011. It has been for the third year running that corporate social responsibility projects launched by the Amway company received a high assessment from the expert jury at a Corporate Charity Leaders national competition in Russia. This time it was a partnership project by the business newspaper Vedomosti, the audit and consultancy network of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Forum Donorov (Donors Forum), a Russian nonprofit partnership of grant-making organizations. The project aimed to find out the best practices in the creation and implementation of corporate charity programs and disseminate information about them in the business community and among the general public. Structurally, the project was comprised of a study of corporate charity based on an approved methodology and a competition of charity programs that ran in three categories.

The categories were Banks, Retailing and Consumer Sector Companies, and Manufacturing and Commodity Companies.

A Child’s Smile, a joint project with UNICEF, received the third prize in the Retailing and Consumer Sector Companies category.

CJSC Mercedes Benz RUS won the first and British American Tobacco Russia (BAT Russia) the second prize.

This year’s study covered 53 companies. They included leading Russian companies such as Lukoil, Russian Standard, Severstal, UralSib, AFK Sistema, and RUSAL and Russian subsidiaries of foreign companies such as Mercedes Benz, Reiffeisenbank, Intel, BAT Russia, Citibank, and Unimilk.

The findings of the study and an analytical review of the state of corporate charity in Russia were published in a special supplement to Vedomosti entitled “Blagotvoritelnost” (“Charity”).