1. Biz Network April 2021 1-40.qxp_Chamberlink 26/03/2021 11:03 Page 22
THE BIG INTERVIEW
Businesses giving back Whether it’s known as giving back, corporate social responsibility (CSR) or environmental, social and governance (ESG), businesses have a vital role to play in their communities. Dan Robinson finds out what the key drivers are for supporting good causes and how companies can create more impact via such projects from a range of business leaders, who debated their experiences at the Chamber’s first virtual President’s Dinner of 2021.
MICK HALLORAN CAPITAL ONE DIRECTOR OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS Ever since Capital One arrived in the UK more than 20 years ago, we’ve been active in the communities where we operate, including Nottingham. But about five years ago, we took a step back to analyse what impact our activity was having. We'd done amazing things but realised some engagement was piecemeal – for example, our associates would support a community facility by painting it. There's nothing wrong with that, and we still do this type of activity, but we recognised we should invest more in being truly transformative to the people we engage. That made us think about scale versus investment. We might not always be able to help thousands of people with our programmes, but spending longer than an hour or two with 100 people is more transformative to their lives. So we’ve developed longer-term strategic programmes with relatively strict criteria for who we’ll engage with. We particularly focus on helping disadvantaged young people who wouldn’t otherwise get these opportunities. From our associates’ perspective, it's incredibly motivating for them to feel like they work for a company that contributes to its community. We also see younger people coming into the organisation at graduate and junior levels are increasingly asking explicitly what the purpose of our company is beyond the core role we serve. This makes it very important from both a recruitment and retention perspective. Having this strategy in place and the values of our company allowed us to move quickly when lockdown began. We built on existing relationships with school partners and charities to provide hundreds of laptops to the people they identified as being at risk of digital exclusion and isolation.
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HELEN DONNELLAN DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS ENGAGEMENT Universities have been involved with civic engagement and putting something back into their local economies for quite some time. Yet we’ve done a lot of this work without actually explaining to our staff and students what we were tackling. For example, 100,000 children in Leicester live in food poverty so how can we, as an organisation, make a difference? When staff hear these kinds of statistics, it really affects their attitude on how we can deal with a problem they may otherwise be unaware of because they only come into contact with an organisation’s local community for work.
‘We’ve done some work that’s shown us how young people genuinely feel a strong drive to work somewhere with shared value’ Measuring impact is also crucial and this is something we started doing about 18 months ago for our voluntary work, which includes running a food bank and teaching STEM subjects. We’ve done some work that’s shown us how young people genuinely feel a strong drive to work somewhere with shared values so communication is important, while we’ve found they have a very local and global approach. They’re interested in big enablers like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, but they want their volunteering and charitable activity to be local – and to have an impact on those global issues. Going forward, it would also be useful to think about how businesses can give back to other businesses. There’s lots of smaller companies that are embedded in their communities, but are struggling to do work that has a big impact on their local area.
