X5 Group  announces the establishment of the Helping Out corporate foundation to centralise all its charitable and social initiatives. The Foundation will focus primarily on providing food aid to people in need, promoting healthy lifestyles, creating a comfortable and safe environment for local communities, and fostering a culture of volunteering.

Ekaterina Lobacheva, X5 Group President, commented:

“We established the Helping Out charitable foundation to offer professional and effective assistance to as many people as possible. Our mission is to build a system of mutual aid and support for people in difficult situations throughout the country. We wanted to create a platform that brings together our millions of customers, as well as hundreds of thousands of caring employees and thousands of suppliers and partners. By leveraging X5 Group’s experience, scale and technological capabilities, we aim to create an accessible aid infrastructure to offer daily help to those who need it.”

By creating an in-house charitable foundation, the Company aims to significantly increase the amount of funding that will be allocated towards charitable programmes and expand the number of people who will be able to receive assistance under key charitable and social programmes run by X5 Group. The Foundation will engage new partners and reinforce its collaboration with local non-profits by leveraging X5’s own infrastructure and digital services.

X5 plans to transform this initiative into a tool to support its strategic sustainability goals, which in turn contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the national development goals of the Russian Federation through 2030. The latter include maintaining the country’s population, supporting health and well-being, and creating a comfortable and safe environment.

As part of its food aid initiatives, the Foundation will further develop multiple formats to provide food aid to various categories of people in need. This includes scaling up the Basket of Kindness food aid project, increasing the volume of products nearing their expiration date that are donated through food sharing, boosting donations from X5 Group’s retail chains and dark stores, and expanding the distribution of food assistance cards. Along with basic food aid, the Foundation will promote healthy lifestyles and offer education on the basics of proper nutrition.

The Foundation will draw on X5 Group’s vast, country-wide footprint to support local communities across Russia by helping them to implement their initiatives and address key challenges. These efforts will be consolidated around the Company’s existing projects, such as Local Community Centres (LCCs, social initiatives for local neighbourhoods run via local Pyaterochka stores); the Safety Zone project to help lost and disoriented people in partnership with LizaAlert; programmes to create an accessible environment, promote inclusion, prevent social orphanhood and provide help to animals; as well as various green initiatives and support for farmers and local producers. The Foundation will also develop comprehensive volunteering programmes to support and encourage volunteering among X5 employees and local communities.

X5 has been consistently involved in food assistance programmes since 2015 through its Basket of Kindness project. Over this period, more than 1.152 million people in need received 2,467 tonnes of food and non-food items. X5 was also the first retailer to pioneer food drives and food sharing projects in Russia in partnership with organisations such as Foodbank Rus, Foodsharing and others. Today, X5’s food sharing programme covers Moscow, St Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Ryazan, Izhevsk, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Voronezh and Tomsk. The project involves 62 Pyaterochka and Perekrestok stores, 11 dark stores and one distribution centre. Last year, over 95,000 people received 56 tonnes of non-expired food and non-food products through the project.