A round up of news stories regarding community issues from June and July 2008.
Social enterprises categorized
A new research by Venturesome, the social investment fund of the Charities Aid Foundation, distinguishes three different models of social enterprises. The first category describes a business which operates entirely for profit, but uses some of it for a social purpose. The second model is an enterprise with social impact such as the fair-trade business Café Direct. The last category covers an enterprise whose financial return increases in parallel with its social return (e.g. wind farm).
(30 July 2008)
City of London, Canary Wharf plc, cScape and The Times have joined together to sponsor the 2008 Journalism Summer School. The free, annual programme takes London state school pupils and helps them realize their ambition of a career in the media. With 100 applications for 22 places this year, interest in the summer school is growing fast. The Journalism Summer School was initiated by online magazine, spiked, in 2006, and is run by Journalism Education, a not-for-profit company.
A fundraising partnership between Leukaemia Research and Argos has doubled its original target of £400,000 to raise £800,000 for the charity. The retailer and the charity teamed up for in-store fundraising events and collection days. Customers were given the option of adding a 20p donation to any items bought from the chain of shops. Leukaemia Research has been chosen by Argos employees from a shortlist of charities in July 2007.
City 4 A Day Programme focuses on change in pupils’ attitude
The City of London Corporation recently confirmed that it would renew its funding of the City 4 A Day scheme for the 2008/9 school year – taking it up to its fourth year working to transform pupils’ prospects in the City fringes. As part of a larger drive to raise results and motivate children in these lower performing schools, the City of London Corporation works with nine of the schools listed in the National Schools Challenge in its City 4 A Day programme.
Barclays Stockbrokers launched a National Share Giving Day on 21st July. This new initiative offers Barclays Stockbrokers investors the chance to donate their small or unwanted shareholdings to a wide range of UK charities. Barclays teamed up with ShareGift, the share donation organisation. ShareGift exists to provide a solution to the longstanding problem of unwanted small shareholdings. The charity collects unwanted shares that cost more to sell than they are worth, sells them and donates the proceeds to a wide range of UK registered charities.
As part of its 60th anniversary celebrations, Land Rover donated 60 vehicles to the British Red Cross Society and its sister national societies around the world. The vehicles were officially handed over to the Red Cross president, HRH The Prince of Wales, during a garden party at Buckingham Palace. In an unprecedented move, the vehicles, a mixture of Defender, Discovery and Freelander models, were arranged in the form of a cross in the quadrangle of the palace.
Waitrose plans to donate £2.28 million to local charities. The supermarket chain plans to award nearly 7,000 community projects in the next 12 months. The money is being donated as part of Waitrose’s plans to support more local causes, and will not affect its national fundraising initiatives. The Community Matters scheme will be available in the company’s 190 stores. Each one will receive £1,000 a month, which can be distributed between three local projects.
Hewlett- Packard announced donation of 500 HP iPAQ Travel Companions with GPS technology, valued at approximately $300,000, to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), supporting the establishment and operation of a public health surveillance and evaluation effort in the earthquake-affected Sichuan Province. The donation increases the total HP contribution to Sichuan earthquake relief and recovery initiatives to more than $3 million (RMBY 21.46 million).
The John Lewis Partnership’s Golden Jubilee Trust is inviting charities to apply to take advantage of the retailer’s employees on secondment. Each year about 50 employees are transferred to a charity for up to six months. John Lewis Partnership spokeswoman Kate Beames said the programme is very popular with employees. “We want to keep the range of charities involved very broad because our employees have different interests,” she added.
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