News
Newsletter, January 2010
A short piece to keep you informed and inspired about how businesses have been developing their people through community projects and building their CSR credentials with our help. We also give a quick plug for our column in HR Magazine and announce our Open Programmes taking place in March.
We’ve been kept busy with some fabulous projects benefiting both businesses and communities, including:
A team from Fujitsu Services spent 8 weeks working with children’s charity The Place2Be to analyse the charity’s training services and make strategic recommendations for how they develop their services. Fujitsu’s motivations were around giving their people a project from which they could learn and through which they could make a real difference. See the short case study.
We devised a short, sharp project for a department at Pfizer as part of an offsite meeting. They spent a day focusing on the strategic issues of the inspiring health charity Amy and Friends that supports kids and their families with the rare disease Cockayne Syndrome. See the short case study.
Sky is committed to developing its people though real-life projects and the recent concluding module of their ‘Podium Leaders’ programme was no exception. We ran a two-day project with charity IntoUniversity that helped participants to apply the leadership skills they had developed in previous modules by working with a group of young people on a sports project. See the short case study.
We’re excited to be helping Danone Waters to source an education project in Africa with which to reward their people for hitting stretch sales targets. They will be making a significant donation to Kenya Orphan Project to spend on the redevelopment of a school in the slums of Kisumu, western Kenya and a small group of Danone people will visit the school in April to volunteer on the project.
Finally, demand for consultancy projects has been growing. We’ve helped BUPA design a graduate assessment project with a community focus; we’re working with Sky on the issue of measuring and evaluating community engagement programmes and we’re starting a project with Bovis Lend Lease to help them develop their community investment framework.
We’re in the press. Jan's column in HR Magazine has been launched; amongst other topics it explores why so many businesses have come round to engaging with communities for reasons that go way beyond philanthropy, challenges businesses to do it properly and looks at what can go wrong when they don’t. Have a look at the January column.
Last but not least, we are running two OPEN PROGRAMMES in late March – one in London and one in Scotland. They will be structured, experiential learning programmes which will see groups of people from a range of companies work together on a challenging two-day project with a charity partner. The open programme is ideal for companies who would like to sample community-based learning for the first time. Please let us know if you would like more information.