Our fifth anniversary as Penguin Random House in July 2018 provided an unprecedented opportunity to unite around the globe to get more books into the hands of more readers. Through a special anniversary global book donation, we offered every Penguin Random House employee worldwide a selection of free books to donate to any philanthropic or nonprofit organization of their choice. Thousands of our employees joined the campaign, and we were able to provide more than 72,000 books to children and adults in need. Recipient organizations included schools, libraries, hospitals, rural development NGOs, and organizations that serve homeless and incarcerated individuals.

Penguin Talks is a program of free creative talks for young people across the U.K. and Ireland. Attendees are given the opportunity to hear from and ask questions to a world-renowned thinker, writer, or influential figure from our family of authors. Held in local schools, Penguin Talks is meant to help equip students by introducing them to new ideas and perspectives. Each Penguin Talk is published in full online, together with free curriculum-based resources for teachers, in order to enable young people in classrooms to engage with the themes and issues discussed. Former Penguin Talks have included Michelle Obama speaking on the power of education and self-belief, Yuval Noah Harari on the future of the world of work, and Margaret Atwood on protest and activism. To learn more about the program, click here.

In November 2016, Penguin Random House Ireland entered into a three-year partnership with Fighting Words, a creative writing organization established by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love in 2009. This built on a wider long-term partnership between Penguin Random House U.K. and Ministry of Stories.

Fighting Words aims to help children and young people, and adults who did not have the opportunity as children, to discover and harness the power of their own imaginations and creative writing skills. Each year of the partnership, they produced an anthology of creative writing, which our editors helped to edit and our Communications team helped to publicize. We also set up author visits to schools in order to mentor students and provide tips and insight to improve their writing.