Work Hard and Be Nice to People – Amy’s Thoughts on How the Corporate Sector can Care for the Community too
Work Hard and Be Nice to People – Amy’s Thoughts on How the Corporate Sector can Care for the Community too
I’ve been employed by registered charities for nearly the whole of my working life. I used to (perhaps misguidedly) refer to myself as a ‘Third Sector Bunny’.
For me, the private sector was somewhere where you got more money and better perks, but your boss was a slave driver and everyone was a bit mean and you never got to go home on time and you all had to salute a pound sign in the foyer on the way in. Ok maybe not quite so ‘Scrooge and Marley’, but I definitely congratulated myself on working in a ‘safe’ and ‘friendly’ sector, where, no matter what, I could cling to that warm fuzzy feeling that we were the ‘goodies’.
My world view has changed somewhat recently. I now work for (gasp) a profit-making enterprise. Our motto is ‘work hard and be nice to people’.
For every day of corporate training we deliver, we bank one hour. We use this bank of time to help people. We have given back over 400 hours to the community so far, including pro bono coaching and mentoring, supported places on coaching programmes to community and voluntary sector leaders, fundraising for our charity partners and running wellbeing sessions that are free for anybody to attend. We run a ‘beauty bank’ for women who can’t afford the little luxuries most of us take for granted. We are guardians of a local charity, Back-up Northwest.
We sit on the Greater Manchester Social Value Network steering group. We are a member of the Give2Gain community. We do litter picks. We support and promote the good things that are going on in our town. We pay fairly, we champion self-care and wellbeing, we seek resources locally, we work ethically, and we hold our supply chain to the same standards.
We need to make money, that is business. Whilst doing this, we do as much good, act with as much compassion and support as many worthy initiatives as we can.
Work hard and be nice to people.
We are not the only ones. In 2018 Boo co-founded the Social Business Collective, in which other small businesses with big hearts meet to share ideas and learning, to connect and collaborate and hopefully, to create social value for Bolton. We are also members of the Bolton Family, a group of conscientious private organisations who align with the council and voluntary sector to support the Bolton vision partnership, working towards a better Bolton by 2030.
Where do companies like us fit in? Because we are ‘for profit’, is it assumed that everything we do is ‘for profit’. It is, after all, our raison d’etre. That’s not to say however, that we must always act for our own profit. We are sometimes the best-placed organisations to act to profit our communities, too.
That is not to diminish the mighty and necessity work that charities do. It’s just to challenge the assumption that not-for-profits are the only organisations concerned about society. Doing good can’t just be the preserve of charities. You can make money AND a difference. Work hard and be nice to people.
The problem is, people don’t always understand that we are indeed just compassionate people who want to give back to society in a meaningful way. They assume that we are ‘in it for ourselves’ (and our shareholders). They expect us to introduce a sales pitch. They wait, suspiciously, for our agenda to be revealed. This lack of understanding means we are sometimes kept out of the ‘loop’.
We don’t want to just write a faceless cheque and be done with it. We want to muck in, we want to choose projects dear to our hearts, we want to use our own expertise to make someone’s life better. We are all part of this community, we are all in this together. Let us help, let us join in.
I see a shift. Still, when it comes to collaborating across sectors, too often both sides are stuck in my old way of thinking, with corporates seen as indifferent money pots while someone else delivers all the good stuff. I’ve been to plenty of meetings where the plan to continue a project when grant funding ended was to seek support from ‘private enterprise’.
I once asked how specifically how they were going to do this, as I had yet to see it done successfully first hand and was genuinely interested. The question was interpreted as a confrontational one; the response was along the lines ‘erm a café or something, anyway let’s get back to this great thing we are doing!’
Had any private sector organisations been invited to this meeting? No.
On the other hand, there are still businesses that see Corporate Social Responsibility as essentially a box ticking exercise, necessary for the successful completion of audits and tenders. I can’t help but feel that they are missing out, on the unparalleled joy of consciously improving another human life.
I have suffered at the hands of a charitable organisation. I was helped by three private, profit-marking companies. By good people who saw I needed help. Prepared to impact their bottom line, they shared their expertise, they gave me time.
Work hard and be nice to people.
Who’s with us?
