SQW is committed to acting as a good corporate citizen, consistent with our mission and values of quality, integrity, impact and collaboration. Our work for clients from the public, private and voluntary sectors to support the design, delivery and evaluation of good public policy is core to this intent. However, this blog aims to shine a light on another way SQW delivers against its commitment to make a positive impact on society – supporting charitable causes.
Firstly, SQW supports its employees to undertake voluntary activities, both individually, and at a company-wide level. All employees are offered, and encouraged to take, up to two days of 'volunteer leave' each year. Examples of how this time has been used in the last year include:
- fundraising for and upgrading a local Scout Group’s facilities
- taking part in Charity Christmas Choir events
- acting as a Samaritans ‘listening volunteer’
- delivering external career guidance sessions in a local secondary school
- attending Board-level meetings as a Charity Trustee
- taking part in community clean-up events
- stewarding at sporting events.
Each SQW office organises an annual volunteering day. In the last two years, colleagues have donated a combined total of 65 days - nearly 500 hours(!) - of volunteer time, through activities including packing food parcels in a foodbank warehouse, tree-planting, footpath and park maintenance for several conservation charities… and even mucking out at an inner-city community farm!
The pictures below are from our Edinburgh and London offices’ volunteering days in October 2024, at the Edinburgh and Lothians Green Space Trust and Mudchute Park and Farm.
Secondly, SQW has a staff-led Charity Committee, responsible for identifying and coordinating company-wide charitable activities (including the office volunteering days mentioned above). Committee highlights have included:
- Organising SQW’s annual winter fundraising events. These events have a dual benefit of supporting charities with cash donations made by the company, whilst boosting colleague wellbeing during the long, dark winter months. Last year, our event focused on supporting Cancer-related causes, with employees converting daily exercise into points. And “what do points make?”… well in this case, cash for charitable causes. Colleagues rose to the challenge with aplomb, getting up and out wild swimming, doing yoga, playing touch rugby, Irish dancing, and, in one case, walking 40km along the River Thames! This raised a total of £3,300, split equally between Cancer Research UK and the Dragonfly Cancer Trust. We are currently planning for the Winter 2025 event – so watch this space for more details!
- Trialling the delivery of pro-bono consultancy support. Our Stockport Office has been delivering a partnership-based approach to working with the Arc Centre (Arts for Recovery in the Community), a Charity that works across Greater Manchester to provide arts programmes and services to improve people’s mental wellbeing. Based in Stockport’s iconic Hat Museum – which neighbours SQW’s office – we have supported Arc’s team by conducting a literature review exploring the economic impact of mental ill health nationally and in Greater Manchester, and designing infographics to communicate Arc’s key impact measures for the year. Arc has used these to help it plan, write reports, market its services and recruit new staff. Speaking about SQW’s support, Arc’s team have said:
Third, SQW actively looks for opportunities to support charities through its wider operations. For example, when the London team moved office this summer, we donated surplus furniture to local charities, rather than see equipment go to waste. Several SQW colleagues arranged the collection of printers, a shredder, chairs and even a full-size board table for charities with which they have a personal connection. Similarly, one of our colleagues acts as Trustee for the BEARR Trust, a charity that supports health and social welfare in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. SQW has offered the Charity space to host Board meetings in the company’s London Office, provided word document templates for reporting and annual accounts, and a cash donation that supported their Ukraine Appeal in 2022, used to support community organisations in the country.
We are proud our charitable work at SQW. As we look forward to continuing this into the future, it is helpful to reflect on what we have learned:
- What constitutes successful and positive impact can vary, informed by the mission, model and needs of the charities we work with. We therefore expect it will be important for us to continue to adopt a wide-ranging, flexible and open minded approach to make meaningful contributions and add real value.
- Our approach to working more closely with charities needs to be considerate of, and positively contribute to, their own activities and core mission. From our experiences with the Arc Centre, we have seen that delivery of a service-based offer can benefit from a long-term ‘partnership-based’ approach, which enables alignment and mutual understanding to be built.
- For charitable activities to be effective they need to be well motivated and resourced. An over-arching company-level commitment to supporting charitable causes, complemented by putting in place the structures and processes to enable and organise delivery are key. However, alongside this, the enthusiasm and drive of colleagues that are willing to offer their time, ideas and efforts to these activities is vital.