DISCOVERYPROGRAMME

At the Guardian conference I met with people running Social Enterprises, and people from private sector organisations including Price Waterhouse Coopers. It was a high-powered audience and in the (too brief) workshop section at the end of the day, I was forced to scrutinise my (typically combative) attitudes towards the private sector.

The group was asked discuss how profit-making businesses can work best with voluntary sector organisations (including Social Enterprises). I said that I sometimes felt annoyed by the often piece-meal nature of Corporate Social Responsibility policies. I said that in my experience companies claim to want to be 'involved' with our work in a 'meaningful' way (i.e. by not 'just' offering money, by employees being personally engaged in our work), but that they stopped short of making time commitments that were significant enough to make this 'involvement' a useful exercise. The result, I said, was that we ended up arranging what were essentially team building days for corporate employees without being paid for it: teams of T-shirt wearing accountants turning up once a year to dig the garden or take our members out on a trip.

Not an especially vital part of our service delivery (please note this is my own opinion and not that of Headway East London or any of its employees that work directly with corporate volunteers). And, of course, in the face of the funding gap between the private and voluntary sectors, the perception that 'just' offering money is somehow a less valuable contribution is frustrating (according to the Guardian, the CEO of Goldman Sachs was this year awarded a bonus of £54.7million. The bonus projected for the average GS employee this year - £300,000 - could very easily pay for the start-up costs of entire Discovery Programme). I also mentioned that I had sometimes felt it somewhat patronising when corporates had offered 'help' in terms of expertise rather than funding - the assumption being that, because they work in the private (real) business sector, they would automatically have some useful expertise to offer their poor cousins in the non-profit sector. I stand by these observations in principle. I still think there needs to be a culture change. But what the group session afforded me was the chance to realise that there is a responsibility on our side too, that righteousness will get us (me) no-where and that, if a change is to occur, we have the opportunity to play a big part in it by finding meaningful and productive ways to involve private sector organisations in our work: both in terms of funding and expertise. I made some notes about how this would impact on the Discovery Prog (above) and, this week, Josh, Firoza and I talked about how we could realistically involve Trayport in the documentary project as providers of genuinely valuable mentoring and funding: offering both strategic and budgeting consultancy, funding for kit rental and (perhaps?) funding for the team to employ production mentors (people who can help them learn how to realise their ambitions for the film).