Three Hands > News > Newsletter, May 2006
Welcome to our first ThreeMail
May 2006In this issue:
- Three examples of linking business, people and communities
- A bit about us
- Have some fun, write a haiku and win champagne!
At Three Hands we link business, people and communities (the three hands of our name) in innovative ways. So here are three interesting examples of how we’ve done this over the past few weeks:
An Orange Wednesday for Age Concern Oxfordshire
On Wednesday 26th April Orange launched something new… but it wasn’t a new Orange product or service. It was a brand new Age Concern Oxfordshire café and day centre in Banbury. A team of Orange employees took on the work required to launch the new service, from publicity and entertainment to catering and hosting, over an intensive two-day period. This was part of Orange’s ‘Community Challenge’ programme, which creates a formal link between community engagement and training and development. Three Hands is working with Orange teams all over the country who would like to benefit from structured team development, while making a positive contribution to the community. This is an approach that is working for Orange; as one senior manager said: “The event was the best team development day that any of us had been on. It was well organised and a huge challenge for us… I can thoroughly recommend this to other managers wishing to build a new team or to reinforce an old one.”
Civil servants drop in to run the sale of the century
What do you do with thirty senior civil servants who want to address team and leadership development needs and who also want to become more familiar with people in society who could be affected by their work? You run a Socially Responsible Development™ (SRD) programme for them. This SRD programme for the Department for Constitutional Affairs challenged the managers to set up and run a charity auction and bric-a-brac sale in just three days, to raise money for The Friary, a drop-in centre for homeless people in Nottingham. The programme was overseen by Three Hands and DCA expert learning and development facilitators to ensure the team achieved an equal balance between the tasks and the learning that was taking place. The team succeeded in raising much needed funds for the charity, in an environment that none of the team had been in before. One of the participants wrote afterwards:“I feel I have now improved my 'working as part of a team' skills, listening to what people have to stay, putting my point of view forward, assessing the situation before making a judgment. Back at the work place these skills will be put into place when looking at the workloads and who needs help the most, listening to what staff have to say, taking their point of view and working with them to an acceptable agreement."
Our consultancy service has been busy too… The Audi Design Foundation is an independent charity, funded by Audi UK, to promote innovation in design. In the run-up to their 10th anniversary year, its managers and trustees wanted to review the impact it had made over its first ten years and plan the future focus, themes and direction of its grants programme. We helped through our Community Partnership Advice service, by facilitating a key trustees meeting and bringing an objective standpoint to decision making by the Foundation’s managers and trustees.
Good things come in threes, but we couldn’t resist adding a fourth example of our work, not only because it shows that it’s not just the big companies that are committed to communities and to developing their people, but also because we think this is an excellent example of our innovative approach to community engagement…
One small company, thirty kids from east London, one big challenge…
Face is a small London-based youth marketing agency employing 9 people.
They wanted to do something a bit more sophisticated than ‘standard’
community engagement…
Partnering with Community Links, one of east London’s biggest and
most established charities, we ran a one-day community engagement and
team development programme for Face, but with a difference: we asked them
to put on, and participate in, a sports afternoon for a group of young
people from a deprived estate in Newham. This was a challenging Corporate
Community Event that was backed up with a specially designed team
debriefing process so that the learning for the Face team could be transferred
back to the workplace. “It was a brilliant
experience. I would really recommend this day to any other company, large
or small, who is committed to the community and is looking to achieve
similar personal and team development objectives to those we set out at
Face” Chief Executive, Face Group.
So why link business, people and communities? Because we believe we can develop organisations and their people by helping them to experience and benefit the communities in which they operate.
And in doing so we create two types of positive impact:
- Business impact, for both learning & development and community engagement
- Social impact, by benefiting communities and charities
We do this through:
Socially Responsible Development™ (SRD™) – our bespoke, award-winning personal, team and leadership development programmes that are proven to be highly effective as a result of their focus on bringing tangible benefits to communities and charities.
Corporate Community Events – original and unique community settings for one day team development programmes, company away days, conferences and charity fundraising events.
Community Partnership Advice – our consultancy service, which helps businesses to develop long-term relationships with communities and charity partners.
And finally, a bit of fun (we like a bit of fun)…
We know time is precious, but we all need to make time for fun. In this, our first ThreeMail, we’re asking you to send us a Haiku poem… and we would like to send you champagne! What’s a Haiku? It’s a Japanese poem with strict construction rules – each poem has three lines and only 17 syllables; 5 syllables in the first, 7 in the second, 5 in the third. They are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity.
We’d love to see Haikus on the very general theme of business, people and communities – the rest is up to you! And the writers of the best three Haikus emailed to simon@threehands.co.uk by Friday May 26th will win a bottle of champagne each, not to mention a slot in the next ThreeMail!
And to get you going, we gave it a go ourselves:
Busy people need
Time to think, act and learn from
The world around them
Regards from the Three Hands team!