Apropos of simply chatting around the topic, I always (well, for the last five years or so - took me many years to get to this point) say out loud in such meetings that if there's no budget for it, the company doesn't really care.

In the last year, after the powers-that-be said they believed in training, saying that out loud has won my team 5% of their time and some capital expenditure for training (works out to a little over a day every month that can be spent on the company dime explicitly reading, watching training materials or other such), and when those same powers said they believed in continuous improvement of the product, on the order of 15% of the team's time can now be booked to just that; working on things that don't provide new features or bugfixes for customers, but just make the software better in general. I was surprised at just how much it turned out that the company really did believe in continuous improvement of the product, when I challenged the powers-that-be to put their money where their mouth is; I am a little worried that if I hadn't opened my mouth, we wouldn't be doing it, but then I suppose that's why people like me are employed - to open our mouths.

I'm not sure know I would spend budget in support of "being proud to be part of BigCo going forwards", but I'd still ask for it and still say that if there wasn't any, it wasn't true. Money seems to sharpen the corporate mind very effectively and force people to actually confront the values they espouse.