Decisions made easier,
Lives made better.
Lives made better.
Grounded in the principles of longevity, our Impact Agenda is an always-on commitment to drive better outcomes for our customers, our communities, and the planet. We believe collective action can accelerate change and, by collaborating with like-minded partners, we know we can make a meaningful impact. Together, we can build a better world.
Our Guiding Principles
Through our Impact Agenda, we’re staying true to our mission and creating a better tomorrow for our business, our communities, and the planet. Through three interconnected pillars that outline the social and environmental areas where we have the greatest ability to effect change, our Impact Agenda serves as a lens to guide our business decisions and community impact.
A Community of Caring
+$30M
in total community investment globally
19,600 hours
volunteered by colleagues in Canada
1,434
charity and non-profit organizations supported across Canada
$3.7M
contributed to charitable and non-profit organizations by our colleagues in Canada donating $2M and an additional $1.7M donated through Manulife’s matching program
Empowering sustained health and well-being
Through our community partnerships and our products, we aim to help people live longer, healthier lives.
Partners in health
Cleveland Clinic Canada
Cleveland Clinic Canada came on board as our Medical Director in 2023. Since then, they’ve helped us fine-tune our products and services while helping our more than 5 million group benefits customers manage their health and navigate the health care system.
Our featured partnerships
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
Our partnership focuses on funding cutting-edge research performed by The Women’s Health Research Cluster (WHRC), a part of CAMH’s womenmind™ initiative. Manulife has invested $1M to support the CAMH womenmind™ initiative, which tackles gender disparities in mental health.
Community Food Centres Canada
With a network of more than 400 community food organizations from coast to coast to coast, Community Food Centres Canada resources and strengthens the community food sector and mobilizes for change. Our support focuses on Food Fit, which supports people who are experiencing barriers to healthy eating and physical activity. 72% of participants reported improvement in their mental health (e.g., mood, level of happiness), and 64% improved their physical health (e.g., strength, fitness level, energy level).
St. Mary’s General Hospital Foundation
The PREVENT Clinic, powered by Manulife, is a multidisciplinary program aimed at preventing heart disease by identifying and modifying risk factors before they become problematic. It’s expected to serve over 2,000 patients in its initial launch stage.
The Douglas Foundation
We helped expand the Minds@Work program, which supports young adults living with mental illness in finding, pursuing and maintaining their career pathways. Our funding also supports the program in expanding its offering to Indigenous communities in partnership with lvirtivik Centre South. 85% of program participants reported that they have greater or equal confidence in their abilities to remain at work.
FitSpirit
We support FitSpirit’s mission to help teenage girls live more physically active lives through extra-curricular multi-sport teams offered in high schools across Quebec. Our partnership focuses on programming with First Nations, making sport and physical activity more accessible to Indigenous girls aged between 12 and 17 years old. In addition, as the presenting sponsor of the FitSpirit Celebrations, we help the organization bring together over 7,000 teenage girls across five cities in Quebec to discover different sports and physical activities.
Featured customer solutions and exclusive products
Manulife Vitality program
Available on select individual insurance products in Canada, Manulife Vitality is a health and wellness program that rewards members for making healthier decisions. In 2024, we made several enhancements to increase engagement and bring better health to even more Canadians.
Manulife Group Benefits
The Manulife Mobile App is making it easier for customers to access their coverage balances and easily submit claims; it also provides educational programs that help customers understand their benefits. For the first time, the app also allowed its plan members to earn Aeroplan® points by completing health challenges. More than 85% of plan members engaged with the health feature, and the September 2024 challenge alone saw a 600-step uptick in steps for members who previously averaged < 7k daily steps.
Driving inclusive economic opportunities
Through education, we can encourage financial behaviours to support financial resilience & create a more even playing field
Our featured partnerships
AI4Good Lab
AI4Good Lab helps bring hands-on education and mentorship in machine learning to women and gender‑diverse people, encouraging meaningful representation for people pursuing education and careers in AI. Participants report a 4.8 out of 5 rating when asked about inclusion and belonging during the program. This is a key metric for measuring the impact of a program which seeks to make the culture in tech/AI more inclusive and address the gender disparity in the industry.
Anishnabeg Outreach
We partnered with Anishnabeg Outreach to establish an Indigenous Farm Training Program to empower Indigenous people with the knowledge, skills and resources needed to become successful farmers. Manulife colleagues volunteered their time harvesting crops and preparing food bundles, contributing 8,000 hours to AO’s total of over 2,000 volunteers to help elevate the program’s goals of advancing reconciliation through hands-on participation.
Windmill Microlending
We supported Windmill Microlending in offering affordable loans to newcomers to Canada eager to restart their careers in finance or healthcare. On average, Windmill Microlending clients see a threefold increase in income and a 75% drop in unemployment upon repayment of a Windmill loan. Thirteen individuals received loans of up to $15,000 to support education costs as well as Canadian licensing or training required to work in their field.
Featured customer solutions and exclusive products
Manulife Life Lessons Scholarship program
This program provides financial support to students who’ve experienced the death of a parent or guardian who did not have life insurance. These $10,000 scholarships help cover the cost of post-secondary education at a critical time in these students’ lives. Now in its seventh year, this program has awarded more than $860,000 in post-secondary funding to 86 Canadian students.
Smart$ense
It’s never too early to teach kids about money and help them build financial knowledge. That’s why we created, Smart$ense, an age-appropriate resource that helps kids aged 6 to 18 years learn financial basics and build the foundation for positive money habits. Every year, thousands of children and teens benefit from this program and build the foundation for positive money habits and financial empowerment.
Manulife Bank
In 2024, we continued to improve our customer and advisor experience. This meant eliminating 32 irritants and introducing 79% more new digital features than the previous year.
Financial Resilience and Longevity Report
For the past four years we’ve conducted an annual survey to help us understand how people feel about their finances and their ability to fund and enjoy their retirement. These insights help our retirement plan sponsors, financial intermediaries and retirement plan providers give customers the tools to build financial resilience so they can thrive today and throughout their lives.
Our personalized member engagement program.
This program helps our retirement plan participants in Canada access unbiased, non-product-specific educational materials.The program covers not just retirement but also navigating the healthcare system, saving for children’s education and investing. In 2024, we expanded the program to bring it to more people, including non-customers. Every single quarter, this program reaches almost 1 million members
Accelerating a sustainable future
Everyone has a part to play in building a sustainable future, because everyone has a stake in that future; we’re helping to preserve the planet we all share.
Climate Action
Manulife’s Climate Action Plan
Since releasing our Climate Action Plan in 2021, we have made significant progress. Our Climate Action Implementation Plan Report details our approach to implementing decarbonization efforts across our operations, our General Account investments and our products and services. It also outlines specific steps we are taking to achieve our targets.
Our Featured Partnerships
Clean Foundation
Clean Foundation brings specialized teams together to work on complex problems, delivering many climate action and capacity building projects and initiatives around Nova Scotia, PEI and the Atlantic region. The Energy Advisor Internship program helps underserved and underrepresented Nova Scotians to become fully employed Natural Resources Canada Registered Energy Advisors, non-profit employees, and government workers in the energy field. Throughout 2024, 8 people were hired as Energy Advisors, non-profit employees, and government workers in the energy field. This not only helped create positive change in the environment, but also in the lives of the people trained.
The Bentway, Toronto
Anchored under the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, the Bentway builds new forms of green space for Toronto’s growing population, connecting urban-dwellers to each other and to their city. We helped The Bentway chart a course for expansion to improve the health, well-being and quality of life of 200,000 urban residents, all while setting a leading international model for hybrid infrastructure.
Nature Conservancy of Canada
The NCC is Canada’s leading national land conservation organization. In 2024, Manulife partnered with them to expand an innovative technology that predicts the distribution of species in areas of conservation interest, helping NCC and landowners make evidence-based conservation decisions. In addition, we host the NCC’s webinar series Investing in Nature on our internal educational channel. 1,500 species have been tracked through the distribution modelling framework so far.
Concordia University
Through our partnership with the University, we fund the Manulife Sustainable Investment Practicum, which aims to become the national leader in the delivery of sustainable finance training for students and practitioners. The Practicum provides undergraduate business students with hands-on experience in managing a $4-million virtual equity portfolio that integrates environmental, social and governance factors into its investment strategy.
Featured customer solutions and exclusive products
Manulife’s Sustainabilities program
Our Sustainabilities program guides both young minds and adults through the essentials of sustainable investing, empowering them to make informed financial choices while also making a positive contribution to our world. Since its launch, over 31,000 people in Canada have taken this course.
Explore Impact in 2024
Download our Impact PDF
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