In 1983, a 22 year-old black analyst at a midtown Manhattan firm decided he wanted to become a community organiser.
He left his safe job and moved to Chicago, exchanging an orderly world of financial data for the drugs, deprivation and institutional neglect of a downtown housing project. He didn't know what "organising" really entailed. But he was clear on one thing: communities aren't a given. They have to be created, fought for, tended like gardens – and not from the top down, but by "mobilising the grassroots." This man was Barack Obama.
Collaborating for communities
Thirty years later, 73 specially trained individuals are channeling their own inner-Obama, parachuting into 55 of England's most run-down communities. They've come from managerial roles in banking, retail, telecoms, utilities and consumer goods. But they haven't had to leave careers. They're on loan from 21 companies, including Sainsbury's, Lloyds TSB Bank, Fujitsu, Gregg's, Marks & Spencer and BT.
In the words of the scheme's architect, Prince Charles, their job is to "knit together" communities; to consult on local challenges and – over secondments lasting up to two years – help catalyse and coordinate solutions by connecting local businesses, charities, community groups, social enterprises and councils.
The Business Connectors programme, run by Business in the Community (BitC), has just marked its first anniversary. It estimates that it has already directed support worth £2.5m into some of the country's most deprived areas – including Milton Keynes, Middlesbrough, Swansea and my own hometown, Stoke.
Equipped with a £4.8m lottery grant to scale up the programme, BitC plans to recruit, train and place more than 600 business connectors, representing more than £39m worth of business talent delivering support worth £52m to local communities in more than 200 areas over the next five years.
Peeling the onion
British businesses, have a long history of supporting communities. From the 1980s onward, corporates have tended to move away from small-scale community activities run by the local branch toward flagship strategic programmes that are centrally run and nationally aligned. This shift, driven by imperatives to build (and in some cases, resuscitate) corporate trust, has accelerated by 50% over the past five years.
But Business Connectors marks a new approach and a reversal of sorts, which on the surface, flies in the face of modern community investment orthodoxy. This approach is best characterised by what Kamel Hothi, business and community director at Lloyds TSB Bank, calls "peeling the onion." The metaphor refers to the advice she gives new Business Connectors as they land in and begin to meet with the communities to which they've been seconded: "Don't jump in with preconceived solutions until you really understand the challenge. Peel the onion."
Relocalising community investment
In this way, companies and their connectors see communities from the bottom up, not the top down. The programme is intensely local, needs-led and issues agnostic. Priorities are informed by the community, not selected by the company, says Lisa Cunningham, Business Connectors' programme director.
This bespoke approach has three important advantages over the conventional breadth, but not depth model:
1) Corporate resources are directed to the areas that most need it, considering official deprivation data, other work already being done in these places and a desire to strike a balance between rural and urban communities.
2) Local challenges are objectively defined in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders. When business connector Kelly Metcalfe, an HR manager seconded from Fujitsu, landed in Salford, she spoke with Salford City Council, the police, the probation service, schools, the Connexions careers service, Job Centre Plus, various charities and Salford Community and Voluntary Services. After several weeks of discussions, "it became very clear that there was a real need for support to help long-term unemployed people in the city develop new skills and increase their awareness of the jobs they could consider doing."
3) Business connectors employ their extensive connections to help find solutions. The programme places a big emphasis on creating a self-sustaining network of individuals, from a range of companies, with a diverse set of skills and experiences. As such, the connectors are able to share and draw on each others' strengths, local lessons and companies' resources.
A "community arms race"
All this attention to detail, however, costs money. Sainsbury's are committing £1m and four employees per year over the next three years and Lloyds Bank, who plan to place 60 people over the same period, are investing around £9m.
For some businesses, particularly those in sectors suffering from severe trust-deficit disorder, Business Connectors forms part of a journey of re-establishing what it means to be a community-based organisation. Candidly acknowledging how banks have gone from pillar of the community to being pilloried by the community, Hothi suggests Lloyds Bank fall squarely into this category.
For others, such as Sainsbury's, where localism is already firmly embedded, this is an experiment in reaching ever deeper into community life. Business Connectors "gives us the opportunity to test just how far we can take the local emphasis," says Alex Cole, director of corporate affairs for Sainbury's. Retailers are engaged in a "community arms race," she adds.
Hothi says Lloyds Bank is still discovering new ways to leverage the programme, but connectors are already in high demand across a number of internal departments – whether to help focus groups for marketing new products and services or to provide context and contacts for government procurement and public affairs work.
Business Connectors deliver business benefit by giving corporate HQ the ability to empirically road test, review and refine community strategies, of which they ordinarily have only an anecdotal or dryly statistical understanding. Almost all the companies to which I spoke had identified things they would now look at differently.
Underpinning all of this, however, is an assumption that even in an age of online shopping and internet banking, where two-thirds of us live in hermetic ignorance of our neighbours next door, UK businesses believe there is still such a thing as community.
Phil Drew is an associate director at communications consultancy Fishburn Hedges, advising global brands and businesses on reputation and sustainability.
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