23 Oct 2011

O2 Learn Competition Winner

O2 Learn was set up by Kate Richardson and Harriet Barclay from the 2010 On Purpose cohort. www.o2learn.co.uk is a free video library of lessons for secondary school students - a bit like a youtube for learning. It allows great teachers to upload their best lessons to the platform, making them accessible to young people everywhere. The website is a supporting pillar of O2's core CSR brand: Think Big, which aims to support young people in every area of their lives.

A competition was launched on the site in November 2010 to encourage teachers to contribute video content. On Friday 14th October, the winner of this year's prize was announced and the O2 Learn team threw a surprise assembly at the winning school. Click here to see the winning video and here to see a clip from London Tonight from this past Friday evening.

13 Oct 2011

Company Fundraising launches at JustGiving

It was a high point of my placement this week when we launched JustGiving’s new Company Fundraising product. It’s a really exciting new fundraising tool that enables companies to celebrate their charity partnerships and bring all their employee fundraising activity together in one place. JustGiving is built on the premise of fundraising as a social activity – and (although I’m a little biased!) this product seems to me to be a great way to build a sense of community and purpose at work.

Employees can view current appeals or sign up for company events, join teams, and even try to get to the top of the fundraising league table. It’s easy to see how your efforts contribute to the company’s overall total. Employers can promote appeals, get better visibility over their fundraising activity as a whole, and run reports to make company matched giving easier – meaning more money for charities.

Some of Britain’s best known companies have been trialling the product for the past six months – and it’s been brilliant to see it evolve. Waitrose, for example, piloted the tool with its London-based employees, and raised over £30,000 for sports charity The Lord’s Taverners. This paid for a brand new minibus to give young people the opportunity to get involved in more sporting activities. A 900-strong workforce took part in Barclays’ Step in to the Night event and raised over £50,000 for UNICEF and Have a Heart.

Of course, employee fundraising is only one aspect of corporate citizenship, and certainly it shouldn’t be seen as an alternative to embedding social purpose at the heart of a business model. But that’s no reason to celebrate it any less. During my time at JustGiving I’ve seen just how inspirational fundraising for charity can be (and, of course, how important this is to the charities themselves). And at our launch event this week we heard directly from Barclays the great effect it has on employee motivation and engagement.

And as for my own motivation – well, there’s times in any job when you can get a little weary communing with your computer screen . There’s nothing quite like getting out of the office to reconnect with your job’s mission. In the run up to the launch of Company Fundraising some of my favourite days have been those out and about with company fundraisers as they’ve walked, abseiled and cycled in aid of great causes. I met Gigi from Barclays who single-handedly raised over £2,000 for UNICEF and Have a Heart. And I got to hang out with Maria (you might recognise her as Superwoman in our short film!) who masterminded KPMG employees abseiling down the side of their Canary Wharf building in aid of Barnardo’s (they raised over £20,000 in 2 days). It’s been pretty inspiring stuff!


3 Oct 2011

Walled garden's awakening

Sometimes people in social enterprise slip into detachment from reality behind their LCD screens as easily as their business-as-usual colleagues. When we start to confuse social impact metrics for real people, or carbon credits for, well, anything real, it is probably the time. It is the right time to get ourselves out of our offices and to dive into some offline, hands-on, local engagement experience. Luckily there is no shortage of opportunities.



Less than two weeks ago on a beautiful Sunday morning, I found myself amidst a gang of volunteering 'Garden Angels' in eastern London. The sun was shining, people were getting dirty and excited, and one walled garden was slowly awaking from its long slumber, sending ripples to the whole neighbourhood.



The garden, the people, and the whole project were an unusual mix, aiming to go far beyond just planting a patch of lettuce. Their aim was to recreate a meaning for the old place within the context of contemporary communities. Pulling together an award-winning singer
Imogen Heap, design thinking and micro-urbanism expertise of Clear Village, a bunch of excited volunteers from all over the world, and committed local partners, it was a collaborative effort to inspire local communities. To inspire locals by retelling the forgotten tale of a vast, magnificent, Georgian kitchen garden lying hidden within its four-meter walls amidst a beautiful park on a hill overseeing London. A tale about a garden that used to serve those in a dire need as a food source of last resort, before it was shut down. A garden that was vandalised and erased from memories of common folk of that area.



This project by Clear Village saw the garden re-inhabited for a week, showed a glimpse of the garden's potential, and teased the locals with some thought-provoking questions: Should an enchanting place of such a deep soul and history stay neglected? Can it be helped to a grow into a new meaning in the 21st century? Can we find new invigorating modes of coexistence between the garden and the humans? Could it become a refuge, an organic food site, a place of gathering, a place of peace and joy? What effort and commitment would that require?



Such questions are not unique to this walled garden project, and they capture a lot of what a social enterprise is about in my eyes -- real communities and their places -- that is where social enterprise happens. And those of us whose sense of reality is too often endangered by an office space should get out from time to time to projects like this one to stay in touch.