By Richard McKeever
It seems like every day brings fresh news stories of economic gloom and financial difficulty. There is frequently an underlying cynicism with news coverage and comment citing the greed of businesses and individuals whose only motivation is personal gain. This one dimensional view however is is not the full story that we experience at Community Links. We are located in east London close to Canary Wharf and the City of London; many of our most needed projects wouldn’t operate at all if it wasn’t for the support of some of “our friends in the city”.
Over the last few weeks our building has been full of children having fun at Easter holiday play schemes – several projects like these rely on the generous input of our corporate supporters to survive.
This news of support and goodwill from business is rarely shared so it was good to complete a project recently with Heart Of The City an organisation set up to help businesses in the City learn from one another how to develop voluntary and socially responsible programmes in community settings. We worked with Heart of the City to produce a report: Building Stronger Communities through Business Collaboration which identifies the successes of the Heart of the City Newcomers’ programme. Fiona Rawes, director of Heart of the City explains the Newcomers’ programme in a short video. The approach is to encourage experienced businesses to get involved in guidance, support and mentoring schemes to assist businesss new to CSR quickly and effectively offer support to community projects.
In the video below Gill Parker, MD of BDGworkfutures, and one of the case studies in the report, talks to Fiona Rawes about the mentoring process and their work supporting an east London community project.
It’s clear that recriminations and groundless complaint will not resolve the damaged economy – but the current situation could be an opportunity for us to look again at how we want to re-structure and learn from what works well as we develop new collaborations between communities and businesses to build stronger communities and a stronger economy in a way that benefits us all.
The full report detailing the work of Heart of the City Newcomers’ programme can be downloaded here. More information from the Heart of the City Website - the video above is one of a sequence of short films by Social Reporter David Wilcox which gives more detail of this work.
