What if your colleagues and staff could help make where they live places where people and nature are better connected?
Through London National Park City’s ‘In Good Company’ partnership, there are lots of ways that you and your staff can directly contribute to making our city greener, healthier and wilder.
Contributing through corporate volunteering is a key way of delivering upon a businesses’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies, giving individual employees and teams the chance to give back to – and strengthen – impactful communities and causes.
A wide variety of corporate volunteering opportunities are offered by charities, community interest companies (CICs) and other nonprofits spanning the length and breadth of London. They cover everything from tree planting to food recovery projects, to animal welfare, circularity, and everything in between. While different in focus, they all share a common goal to engender mutually beneficial change in both corporate volunteers and the organisations they’re giving their time to.
So what exactly is involved in corporate volunteering?
Corporate volunteering opportunities are as plentiful as they are varied, examples include: Heston Community Garden, Cody Dock and Stave Hill Ecology Park.
Let’s hone in on one in particular.
Heath Hands is a charity working across Hampstead Heath, Highgate Wood and the Kenwood Estate (some 350 acres of green space) working on conservation, education, wellbeing projects and more.
They offer outdoor nature-based corporate volunteering programmes, working with teams for either half a day or full day (a minimum cost for corporate volunteering activity applies). Activities vary according to the needs of the individual, but can include habitat management, environmental conservation and litter picking as well as projects that focus on sustainability, or other areas that align with a company’s CSR priorities. Volunteers will receive equipment, training briefings and supervision throughout their time with the charity. Corporate volunteers also benefit from free access to on-site sports facilities (athletics, tennis, team sports, and the famed swimming ponds) as well as having the ability to organise extras in the form of staff meetings in dedicated meeting rooms and lunch.
What are the benefits of corporate volunteering for business?
Successive studies have shown that corporate volunteering has an overall positive effect on employees, boosting engagement, morale, and even happiness levels as well as helping to diversify skill sets. Having corporate volunteering as an employee benefit has also been suggested as a key win in attracting new talent, with one piece of research showing that 86% of GenZs and 89% of millennials say that having a sense of purpose in their work is very or somewhat important to their overall job satisfaction and well-being.
And at a time where hybrid working patterns dominate, corporate volunteering can also give employees meaningful face-to-face contact time with their peers and senior leadership.
What are the benefits of corporate volunteering for nonprofits?
While this isn’t the only goal, corporate volunteering programmes also provide a much needed cash injection for nonprofits, enabling them to invest in enhancing and expanding the scope of their work. One projection suggests that skills-based volunteering could generate up to £17bn of direct and indirect value for charities in the UK.
Corporate volunteering programmes also open up the potential for longer-term relationships with businesses. It’s one thing to read about a charity’s mission through external communications, for example, and quite another to live it out through a day/s of hands-on work, which often involves directly connecting with the charity’s beneficiaries.
Corporate volunteers can also bring a wealth of fresh ideas and approaches to the work of nonprofits, which could find their way into organisational strategy or even help create shifts in day-to-day operations.
How do businesses sign up to corporate volunteering?
Medium-to-large-size nonprofits will often have a section dedicated to corporate volunteering on their website, with a nominated person/team on hand to match you to available programmes according to your particular needs.
Our London-wide volunteering opportunities map has a corporate volunteering filter, enabling users to find the right project for them. We can also connect you with our network of Rangers – operating across London’s 32 boroughs – and supporting a number grassroots greening projects.
Director of London National Park City, Mark Cridge ends with “Partnership is a core principle of London National Park City, and through our In Good Company programme we’ve created lots of ways for businesses of all shapes and sizes to support our work, and that of hundreds of charities and community groups across London. Every business can play its part.”
