League of Legends players have a history of deeply caring about their communities. In the last few years players have donated over $15 million to more than 25 different causes around the world. Their generosity hasn’t gone unnoticed. When the gaming community comes together, we can accomplish truly remarkable things.

Leveling Up Social Impact

Earlier this year we created the Riot Games Social Impact Fund, a unique philanthropic venture fund that allows us to make direct investments into a variety of global organizations aimed at solving some of the world’s most pressing issues. 

In short: This gives Riot, and thus players, an easier, more scalable way to make greater change globally. Since we set up the Social Impact Fund, we’ve already donated over $4 million on players’ behalf to promote equality in education, opportunity, and global citizenship. This Social Impact Fund is our grown-up effort to take our collective impact to the next level and accelerate human progress.

What Does It Actually Mean?

The Riot Games Social Impact Fund is an independent entity separate from Riot Games the developer and publisher. It is also structured in such a way that all funding must be used to pursue positive social impact in our areas of focus.

  • The Social Impact Fund allows us to be more strategic with how we invest, deploy funding, and partner with a wider variety of organizations in pursuit of accelerating positive social change.
  • This new structure also allows Riot to be more creative with how we engage and partner with others globally. To solve some of the most intractable problems today, we simply can’t do it alone.
  • We’ll continue to support organizations focused on solving meaningful problems for our communities, pursuing bold ideas, and prioritizing equality for the disadvantaged.
  • Additionally, this will allow Riot to scale up players’ impact in a multi-game world while being able to involve more of our community. All of our future in-game fundraisers will be supporting the Social Impact Fund to pool our resources together to make the greatest impact possible.

Thank You

On behalf of everyone at Riot, we want to thank our players for their care, dedication, and passion. While not our first steps together in social impact, this is certainly one of our largest. The good we can do together is just getting started, and we can’t wait to see where this road leads us.

Author

Jeffrey "Kushnood" Burrell

Jeffrey Burrell is the Head of Social Impact and Executive Director of the Riot Games Social Impact Fund. He oversees all social impact and sustainability efforts which include in-game fundraisers across Riot’s five titles, the disbursement of funds and grants given out globally by the Social Impact Fund, internal employee fundraising and volunteer efforts. Jeffrey received an MBA from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School.