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Our expertise in the built environment enables us to play a positive role in communities and support important social causes. Find out how we shape a better world.
“Our lives are inextricably mixed up with those of our fellow human beings. ”
Sir Ove Arup The Key Speech, 1970
Honesty, fair dealings with others, and a commitment to humanitarian aims were articulated as core Arup principles in 1970 by the firm’s founder, Ove Arup. These values remain fundamental to the way Arup operates today, influencing Arup’s approach to projects, to clients and collaborators.
Arup’s Community Engagement programme invests about 3% of our profits on community engagement work each year, in five fields of activity. We support local community engagement work, a development fund, disaster relief and recovery work, our Global Challenge, education work, and carbon reduction initiatives.
We partner with many different types of NGO, including REDR, The Prince’s Trust, WaterAid, Bridges to Prosperity, Habitat for Humanity and others, bringing valuable skill sets to their projects and programmes.
Our development fund supports and encourages our people to undertake community-centred and educational activities across the globe. Our people continue to use their professional skills to reduce suffering and improve the lives of those in need, in more than 40 countries in the developing world. Their contributions have included designing buildings and bridges, carrying out surveys, supervising construction, developing tools and delivering training, improving the lives of tens thousands of families through better access to clean water, sanitation, energy, shelter, education and healthcare.
It’s a virtuous circle too. We believe that what our people learn helping communities improves the way we consider designs in future.
The Ove Arup Foundation
The Ove Arup Foundation is a registered charity established in memory of Sir Ove Arup. Its mission is ‘the advancement of education directed towards the promotion, furtherance and dissemination of knowledge of matters associated with the built environment’.
The Foundation promotes and funds educational initiatives that will improve the teaching and understanding of the built environment. It funds research and academic positions, looking for ways to inspire the next generation of designers and engineers. The organisation also places strong emphasis on a central element of Ove Arup’s engineering philosophy, the value of a multidisciplinary, ‘Total design’ approach to engineering and architecture.