From education and healthcare to play, inclusion and community support, philanthropy can be most powerful when it responds to a clearly identified local need. The Smurfit Westrock Foundation supports sustainable projects designed to improve the lives of people in need in communities where Smurfit Westrock operates, with a focus on health and nutrition, basic care and education.

Learning beyond the classroom in Colombia

In Yumbo, Valle del Cauca, the Smurfit Westrock Foundation has supported the introduction of the Social, Emotional and Ethical Learning programme - SEE Learning. The initiative is designed to strengthen relationships between students and schools while supporting children's broader social and emotional development. SEE Learning responds to local challenges around both mental health and educational quality. Students develop socialemotional skills while teachers build new tools and approaches for creating positive learning environments. In its first year, 150 students participated in SEE Learning sessions. Smurfit Westrock employees also supported the planning and facilitation of activities, helping to deliver the programme in the local community.

Originally developed by Emory University, SEE Learning was adapted for the Colombian context with support from the Levapan Foundation, a nonprofit with more than 60 years of experience in social and educational projects in Valle del Cauca. The Municipal Education Secretariat of Yumbo is also a programme partner. What makes the initiative particularly interesting from a philanthropic perspective is the partnership behind it. Rather than creating a standalone intervention, the Smurfit Westrock Foundation helped bring an established model into a local context, connecting external expertise with local organisations, public institutions and the community. It is a reminder that philanthropic funding can do more than pay for activity. It can help bring partners together, adapt ideas and create space to test approaches that respond to particular local needs.

Changing the experience of healthcare in Italy

At the Eugenio Medea Scientific Institute in Bosisio Parini, Italy, a philanthropic investment is changing the experience of medical treatment for young patients. For many children, an MRI scan can be intimidating. The unfamiliar equipment, clinical environment and need to remain still can create significant anxiety - sometimes making examinations more difficult and increasing the possibility that sedation or repeat scans will be required. With €30,000 in support from the Smurfit Westrock Foundation, Italian nonprofit La Nostra Famiglia created Dive Into the Blue, transforming a diagnostic space into an immersive underwater environment. Colourful marine imagery, soothing lights and interactive visual elements create a calmer, more engaging atmosphere for children undergoing scans.

The project is expected to benefit approximately 3,000 young patients who travel from across Italy for medical care. Families and medical staff have already reported a noticeable difference in children's experiences. The calmer environment supports children's emotional wellbeing while also helping examinations proceed more smoothly by reducing the need for sedation or repeated scans. It is a relatively contained intervention, but one with the potential to change the experience of thousands of children and their families. And that is one useful way to understand philanthropic impact: not always through the size of an investment, but through what becomes different because that investment was made.

From figures to lived experience

Across its wider portfolio, the Smurfit Westrock Foundation supports education facilities and school refurbishment, specialist support centres, community facilities, play and sensory spaces, childcare and parental support, humanitarian aid, mental-health and homelessness services, and respite and rehabilitation projects. The Colombia and Italy initiatives are very different in setting and purpose, yet both begin with the same practical question: what does this community need, and what can philanthropic funding make possible? In one case, that means helping schools develop new ways of supporting young people's emotional and social development. In another, it means reimagining a medical environment so that a difficult procedure becomes less frightening for a child. Taken together, the figures and the stories show the different levels at which philanthropy can operate: investing across countries and strategic priorities, while still responding to highly specific needs experienced by individual communities and families