About us
Three Hands was set up in 1998 by Simon Hamilton. Simon had worked in both the private sector and the voluntary sector and, ahead of his time, saw the case for bringing the two together in innovative and mutually beneficial ways.
Three Hands initially concentrated on overseas charity challenge events, giving us valuable experience of project management of overseas projects in developing countries.
However, by 2003 we had organised our first ever UK community-based learning programme; the ‘Children’s Hospital Playbox Challenge’ saw a sales team from Pfizer take on a 5 day project to benefit the small charity Action for Sick Children (Scotland). The programme won us a National Training Award and Three Hands’ concept of developing people through community engagement was born.
Since then our team has built up invaluable experience of linking businesses and charities to tackle companies’ L&D needs and charities’ strategic and day to day operational needs. Our programmes take place both in the UK and developing countries, with particular expertise in India. We’re proud of the client list we’ve built up - including Royal Bank of Scotland, BSkyB, Legal & General, O2, Standard Chartered Bank, Orange and the Guardian - and we are excited about a future context in which the barriers between business and society are becoming less obvious and the benefits of collaboration between the two more evident.
Our mission is to develop organisations and their people by helping them to understand, experience, engage with and benefit the communities in which they operate.
We aim to be a values-driven and sustainable business providing corporate and community organisations with innovative opportunities to work together for the benefit of both.
To us, being ‘values-driven’ means:
- Business gain and societal gain go hand in hand.
- Our priorities lie in ensuring that we provide a first rate service to the companies we work for and the community organisations that benefit from the programmes we deliver
- We are entrepreneurial and we believe in collaboration.
- Our work is meaningful. It resonates with the good in all people.
- We are transparent, honest and show integrity in all aspects of our work.