“Leading and engaging with purpose is a whole new way of doing business. It requires a less transactional and more relationship-based approach. Purposeful Engagement rallies all key stakeholders – internally and externally – around contributing to the greater good. Successful companies of today and of the future will embrace the idea of Purposeful Engagement as an avenue for achieving greater business success, attracting and retaining high performing talent, and building affinity and legacy for its institution, all while helping to make the world a better place.”
For over 50 years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been used by businesses to address their ethical and philanthropic responsibilities in society. Many companies demonstrate their CSR commitments by offering their employees volunteer time, and by deploying some financial resources to worthy causes through sponsorships and charitable donations. Leicestershire Cares has played a key role across Leicester city Leicestershire and Rutland enabling business to match their skills and knowledge to community needs. Often our work has had a strong focus on supporting young people and those seeking work to develop employability skills through active interaction with businesses. We have also supported businesses developing the capacity of local community groups. Central to our approach has been our commitment to working in partnership and brokering relationships between public, private and third sector.
Our cares model seeks to add value to individual companies’ efforts by setting up projects that enable companies to work together and that attract additional resources from both government and donors. Our belief being we can achieve more by working together than by everyone doing their own thing. We are very aware that increasingly many companies are seeking to do more and increasingly talking about “purposeful engagement”:
“to achieve their full potential, public and private companies need to do more than simply give of their time and money; they need to find more innovative and impactful ways to contribute to solving the broader challenges in society.”
Companies are being asked to better integrate their business goals with their public purpose. Recognizing that government can no longer solve societal issues alone, the public is also increasingly looking to the private sector for support. The UK Governments civil society strategy puts a strong emphasis on the private, public and third sector working closely together to develop thriving communities:
"The government believes that social value flows from thriving communities. These are communities with strong financial, physical and natural resources, and strong connections between people. This includes public funding, private investment, buildings, and other spaces for a community to use. It also includes trust and goodwill, and the organisations and partnerships that bring people together. To help communities thrive, the government believes we need to look at five foundations of social value: people, places, the social sector, the private sector, and the public sector."
We believe that our vision, mission and values is strongly in synch with this development and that we have the experience, community knowledge and contacts that enable us to support businesses thinking through and delivering “purposeful engagement in a cost effective and efficient way. If you want to find out more about how we can work with you please contact us by clicking here.