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Mapping corporate philanthropy and community engagement in east London: A research report
Johanna Wadsley, Cathy McIlwaine, Jane Wills, Alastair Owens and Alison Blunt
School of Geography, Queen Mary University of LondonOctober 2013
Centre for PublicEngagement
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Contents
Acknowledgements 2
Executive summary 3
Introduction 5
The Key Players: Corporations, communities and mediating institutions
Corporations 7
The community view 13
Mediating institutions 17
CSR in east London: (historical) geography matters 19
Sustainable partnerships between corporations and communities 23
Economic downturn and partnerships 25
Conclusion 26
Appendix 29
References 30
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Acknowledgements
This project was made possible with funding from the Centre for Public Engagement at Queen Mary University of London to whom we are really grateful. We would like to thank Charlotte Rogers, Melanie Goldsmith and Jon Lloyd who helped us disseminate information about the survey. We are also grateful to Ed Oliver from the School of Geography who drew the maps and produced the cover. Finally, our thanks go to everyone who participated in the research and who remain anonymous.
Cover photograph by Cathy McIlwaine
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Executive summary
This research analyses the evolving relationships between corporations based at Canary Wharf and east London communities over the past 20 years through a focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Corporations are deeply engaged in the well-‐being of communities in east London, particularly in education, training and the mentoring of young people. But there are significant risks, particularly around sustainability, the selectivity of corporate initiatives and wider economic uncertainty. The key players Corporations
• Whilst the CSR remit of companies at Canary Wharf is national and global, companies are involved in a wide range of CSR work in east London.
• Key CSR activities include financial contributions, pro bono services and allocated staff time for volunteering and mentoring.
• Working with younger people is the main priority for companies, with an emphasis on education, training and access to employment.
• CSR benefits companies in six main ways: o Recruitment of the best graduates o Opportunities for employee development o The potential diversification of staff o Fostering ‘responsible’ corporate culture o Improving client relations o The position and brand of the business
• CSR activities are increasingly targeted on particular areas with measurable outcomes to evaluate their impact.
Communities
• After initial hostility to the development of Canary Wharf, community organizations in east London now work closely with a range of companies to access CSR resources.
• Long-‐term strong partnerships have developed.
• Community organizations value their engagement with companies not only in financial terms but also in changing the perceptions and aspirations of people living in east London.
• Corporate-‐community engagement is not risk-‐free. Mediating institutions
• Key brokering organizations are the East London Business Association (ELBA), the East End Community Foundation, Newham and Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnerships, and City Link.
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• Such organizations highlight the needs of the community, act as intermediaries to foster and manage corporate-‐community relations, help to place volunteers, and assist in recruiting local people for employment in certain sectors such as cleaning.
• Their role has changed over time, with brokering organizations now delivering their own projects alongside facilitating the links between corporations and communities.
CSR in east London
• The juxtaposition of rich and poor is stark in east London, reinforcing a moral duty among companies and other actors to act. This echoes Victorian philanthropy.
• Community organizations avoid controversial companies and those not involved for mutual and long-‐term benefit.
• CSR work in east London offers corporations opportunities for progressive engagement with diversity.
• The spatial scope of CSR centres on Tower Hamlets and the ‘inner’ or ‘old’ east end.
Sustainable partnerships between corporations and communities
• The move towards more targeted activities can have a detrimental effect on community organizations
• The increasing requirement to measure the outcomes of partnerships is challenging for some community organizations.
• Sustainability is affected by the role of specific individuals within companies who champion particular causes and projects.
• Companies are not always willing or able to address the most pressing issues affecting east London, especially in relation to immigration and poverty.
• But there are also long and sustainable relationships that can generate innovation.
Economic downturn and partnerships
• Despite some reduction in volunteering numbers because of workforce redundancies, CSR remains active and positive in east London.
• Economic downturn has increased needs such as youth unemployment and legal aid.
• Community organizations hope that long-‐term and embedded relationships with companies can bridge the shortfall in state funding and meet increasing demand.
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Introduction
In just over 20 years Canary Wharf has grown to become a thriving business centre in the
heart of east London. The Wharf now employs 100,000 people and is home to some of the
largest banks and financial and legal services companies in the world (Canary Wharf Group,
2013). The area is still expanding and plans are laid to continue this growth for the next 20
years. In its early years, the development attracted enormous controversy. At the local level,
the strongest voices in the community resisted the arrival of corporate interests and the
perceived lack of democratic control over the development. More generally, many
academics and journalists saw the development as representing all that was wrong with the
emerging political-‐economic agenda associated with Margaret Thatcher’s governments
(Colenutt, 1991; Merrifield, 1993; Pile, 1995). Critics focused on the way that Government
circumvented local democracy and planning controls to open up ground for business
interests and they saw the development as a physical manifestation of the class conflict that
was cleaving the soul of the nation. The communities that had given birth to some of the
proudest triumphs in labour history – new unionism, the dock strike and the Poplar rates
campaign – were becoming victims of a resurgent free-‐market capitalism over which they
had no control.
In many ways, such critics used Canary Wharf as a cipher for the ideological battles they
were fighting over the evolution of national political-‐economic theory and practice, and it
remains relatively easy to read Canary Wharf as emblematic of wider changes in society.
Canary Wharf is a physical testament to the growing importance of finance and associated
sectors in generating economic wealth in a global economy; to the growing numbers of
professional and middle-‐class people who have moved to live in inner city locations; to the
significance of multinational immigration at both ends of the labour market; and to the
growing power of private investment and interests in shaping urban regeneration and
infrastructure (Sassen, 1999; Hamnett, 2003; Wills et al, 2010).
However, as a group of academics working very close to Canary Wharf, we wanted to revisit
this dominant view of the Wharf and its conflict. Funded by Queen Mary’s Centre for Public
Engagement, we designed a small research project to try to get a better insight into the
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evolution of corporate-‐community relations over the past 20 years. To this end we have
analysed corporate reports, conducted an online survey and undertaken 12 face-‐to-‐face
interviews (see Appendix 1). This report documents the main findings of our research.
In summary, our research has highlighted the extent to which corporate social responsibility
(CSR) is taken extremely seriously by companies, community groups and other service
providers and has become embedded in the life-‐blood of both companies and community
groups in east London. Many corporations have developed strong relationships with local
community organisations including schools and charities through a wide range of activities
(see Figure 1). Over time, the individuals involved in these relationships have focused on
identifying and serving their mutual interests: the companies have come to integrate
community-‐based activities into their core business agenda, and so too, rather than being
supplicant, community organisations have been able to access resources that help serve
their goals and priorities.
Figure 1: CSR activities in east London by companies based in Canary Wharf
Source: Authors’ compilation of data provided by companies, brokers, official records and the Charity Commission
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In addition, although a number of important new mediating institutions came into existence
in the early days of the development in order to broker what were sometimes difficult
relationships between the corporations and the community, over time, relationships have
also developed independently and have multiplied (see Figure 2). The development of CSR
has strengths and weaknesses for both parties and in what follows we document these
developments before going on to explore their wider implications for the future
development of east London.
Figure 2: CSR activities in east London by two key mediating organisations
Source: Authors’ compilation of data provided by companies, brokers, official records and the Charity Commission
The Key Players: corporations, communities and mediating institutions
Corporations
From its inception, Canary Wharf has been an unusual development. The national
Government played a key role in establishing the London Docklands Development
Corporation that managed the regeneration of the wider area, and the company Olympia
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and York was allowed to buy the Canary Wharf site for development in the mid-‐1980s. The
company subsequently went bust and has been refinanced twice – highlighting the extent to
which the early stages of the development were never as secure as they might now appear
– but in its current manifestation as the Canary Wharf Group, this company still drives the
development. It remains a combination of land-‐owner, landlord, developer, employer and
mediator between the corporations and local community groups. As a long-‐serving
representative from the company explained during interview:
We have a very deep relationship with the site here in that we own the freehold of
the whole place, all the buildings, all the land, all the roads. It’s a private estate so we
own all the roads and the parks and the shopping centre and the traffic lights, the
security, the trees, refuse collection, street cleaning, street maintenance, this is all us.
And, we’re half-‐finished in terms of the development of Canary Wharf. So Canary
Wharf will be twice as big when we’re finished, so we’re half way through the
development [we’re] 25 years in, which means we’ve got another 25 years to go.
Somewhat unusually, the nature of their early role meant that this company always acted as
part-‐developer and part-‐agent of regeneration. Whereas these roles are usually divided, the
Canary Wharf development was necessarily planned as a social project. As their
representative explained:
We’re a property developer … we’re making money … we’re building shiny towers,
but this is still a regeneration project; we’re still turning space that twenty-‐five years
ago nobody wanted and actually had a negative value, into something very, very
different. And, although we as a private company have never formally had a
regeneration remit, as in, nobody said, you know, ‘make money, and by the way,
here is a list of public policy objectives that you’ve got to meet’, we have effectively
inherited that regeneration remit from the London Docklands Development
Corporation, and operated as if we had a regeneration remit.
Although they didn’t have a statutory duty to think about the social impact of their
development, the family behind Olympia and York decided to think about more than bricks
and mortar right from the start. In part this was due to the need for good local relationships
to make the project happen (to secure labour supplies, and prevent vandalism and protests)
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as well as a genuine interest in the wider success of the project long-‐term. A mixture of
pragmatism and principle came into play such that the pioneer of the site had to think about
the way in which it related to the local population. As the company representative recalled
during interview:
Olympia and York … knew that they had to find local labour, they had to work with
the people like the unions on the boats if they were going to use the river for
transportation. They had to do deals with people, locally, to get … the trucks in and
out; they didn’t want to have barricades up stopping construction from happening.
Olympia and York also knew that once the buildings were completed, they were going to
have to recruit local staff to fill vacancies in retail, security and cleaning and this again
focused corporate minds on relationship building. Indeed, the provision of jobs is the
greatest local appeal of the site and getting local people into employment is widely
recognised as important, even if it is sometimes hard to achieve (see more below).
While Canary Wharf is now home to a plethora of multinational companies whose CSR remit
is global, the commitment of these companies to east London is notable. Indeed, although
the largest multinational companies broker their own CSR activities through charitable
foundations (e.g. the KPMG Foundation, the Credit Suisse EMEA Foundation, the Clifford
Chance Foundation), these have a national and global remit. The offices at Canary Wharf still
have independent funds and programmes to work locally and especially in east London
where needs are viewed as being most acute and/or there is a greater imperative to act.
Nature of CSR activities in companies: Canary Wharf is home to a large number of well-‐
known multinational corporations. Our survey and interviews highlighted the wide range of
activities and geographical locations in which these companies are engaged (see Figure 1).
The main CSR activities focus on financial contributions, pro bono services and allocated
staff time for volunteering and mentoring, although many more ad hoc smaller scale
activities are carried out, often for named charities. Pro bono services predominantly entail
provision of legal, marketing and financial assistance while volunteering included mentoring,
reading in schools, chairing boards of governors of schools or boards of trustees, on
charities, and painting and gardening for various community groups.
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However, the main thrust of the work has been with younger people with a specific focus on
education and training and access to employment. These have been key priorities for much
corporate activity in the local community over the recent years. Many company
representatives recognised that local people may not have either the desire or the means to
access employment at Canary Wharf and, as a result, much CSR activity has been designed
to shift aspirations and improve standards in schools. Many companies welcomed children
and young people in to their buildings as well as sending volunteers out to support reading
and mentoring work in schools. One CSR executive told us that: “You can’t work here in this
kind of environment without wanting to encourage local youngsters … to see this as a place
where they too can work.” While this particular company had three headings for their
activities -‐ “access to justice, access to finance, and access to education” -‐ it was the last that
facilitated most of their contact with the local community.
In this regard, one bank had a particularly holistic approach to their work to help
disadvantaged young people get into employment. They had three different streams of
activity: “One is enterprise skills. One is money skills – financial literacy because we are a
bank. The other is life skills and that is mainly around employability skills.” While this
strategy had been developed across the company as a whole, CSR executives were in the
process of focusing their activities in particular geographical areas (called Deep Local Impact
Areas), including east London. The delivery of these activities was through relationships with
locally-‐based charities, schools and organisations. As an example, the company had funded
a local project that provided mentors to support the most vulnerable children as they went
through secondary school. In a similar vein, another company had sponsored an Academy in
Hackney and provided considerable on-‐going support via the governing board of the school
as well as running extensive volunteering activities for reading and mentoring work.
As indicated above, although we found that education was the prime focus for much CSR
activity in east London, it was not exclusively so. We also came across examples of less
typical practice. One large legal firm had started work with older people in the area telling
us:
We’ve engaged with Age UK London and Jewish Care … [and that] connection came
through one of our Jewish partners for whom we host an annual party … their
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Shavuot annual party … We’ve hosted quarterly tea parties … so we get old people
into the office for an afternoon of tea parties and people can come and chat to these
people who live very isolated lives.
This organisation was also working with the charities Crisis and Peabody to provide
volunteers to assist with CV preparation, mentoring and mock interviewing experiences for
homeless people looking for work. The respondent had been in her post for a long time and
described the work as an ‘organic development’ as she met her company goals while also
building relationships with various local organisations. When they started working with a
new group, they experimented to see what worked and then decided how to take things
forward. While they had been working with one primary school in Tower Hamlets for 18
years, providing volunteers for reading support, and they had other longer term
relationships with a number of the CSR brokers, new relationships were being developed all
the time, often at the instigation of staff.
While this company told us that they always tried to respond to potential demand, a
successful project also depended upon a community’s capacity to “manage the programme
… [and] provide the right throughput of volunteers so that we don’t disengage our own
people.” Although the provision of volunteers tended to mean that the activities had to be
reasonably local to the Canary Wharf office, the company also had long standing
commitments to provide pro bono legal services for a wide variety of organisations, some
local, others national and international. Locally, these included Community Links and Magic
Me, but at a larger scale, they were also supporting organisations such as the National
Autistic Society, Asylum Watch, the Howard League for Penal Reform and Save the Children
UK. This organisation also match-‐funded any money raised for charities by their own
members of staff.
Embedding CSR over time: In relation to trends in the sector, our research highlighted the
extent to which the forms of CSR practised by the companies at Canary Wharf had shifted
over the past 20 years. One respondent told us that not only was it a ‘good thing’ but also
the ‘right thing’, reflecting a moral imperative behind their activities: “number one it’s the
right thing to do and I enjoy it ... We’re a huge employer so we should be looking to help the
people locally to get jobs ... and we have a responsibility there I think.” However, others
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made a stronger business case for CSR. Reflecting wider changes in the field, one respondent
explained how CSR had moved from being “a good thing to do … [to] a business essential.”
This was further echoed by another respondent who reported that although the company
had always prioritised the need to benefit the community, their new leadership wanted to
increase this ethos, saying:
They want us to be doing responsible capitalism. It’s a really broad approach they
want us to take, not just doing community investment. They want every partner in the
business to be thinking about how they can contribute to sustainability through the
work they do. There is a really strong drive for us to be a responsible business and I
think that motivates everybody.
As such, CSR was seen to complement rather than conflict with corporate interests, and
indeed, it was seen as contributing to business success.
In this regard, corporate respondents told us that their community-‐based activities were
good for: (1) recruitment of the best graduates; (2) opportunities for employee
development; (3) the potential diversification of staff; (4) fostering ‘responsible’ corporate
culture; (5) improving client relations and; (6) the position and brand of the business. In this
latter regard, one company suggested to us that winning business increasingly depended
upon demonstrating “what you do for the community [and] … sustainability.” While this firm
was trying to win cleaning contracts, they were mindful that their CSR activities had a
profound impact on the way their brand was perceived, the relationships they made with
potential clients and their ability to sustain business relationships. The firm had newly hired
a CSR director and rather than being regarded as an add-‐on, their work with apprentices,
charities and volunteering was increasingly central to the business itself. As the interviewee
explained: “You’ve got to do it to win business, you’ve got to do it to build relationships with
the client, and it’s the right thing to do.”
Respondents also highlighted the way in which their CSR activities were now more targeted
on particular areas with measurable outcomes that could help them to evaluate their
impact. One corporate respondent told us that they were supporting “fewer, bigger and
tighter programmes.” Such partnerships were then linked to Key Performance Indicators
that could be measured to evaluate the social return on the money invested. As another
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respondent explained in relation to their investment in a school in Hackney: “We did some
baseline work, we checked out what the landscape is like today so that in ten years … we will
be able to measure against [that data]. It’s really important that all of our work is
measurable, that we’ve defined outcomes so we can track whether what we’re doing is
working.” The measurement of outcomes also included the impact on staff, exploring the
extent to which volunteering helped to develop particular skills.
A number of respondents were keenly aware that their CSR activities allowed their staff to
get out of the office in order to learn and practice new skills, as well as providing the
opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with people who were different to them. A
number commented on the diversity of the population in east London, and the chance they
had to connect with very diverse groups of residents. Similarly, one of our community-‐based
respondents noted that the CSR activities allowed professional workers from Canary Wharf
and the City to “show a different side of themselves.” He went on to report that people got a
sense of personal satisfaction from working with pupils in his school; they could make a
contribution to the wider social good as part of their job.
The community view
Local community hostility to the early development of Canary Wharf was not widely
discussed in relation to community relations in general or CSR in particular. Somewhat
ironically, the clearest expression and justification for the conflict came from the
representative of the Canary Wharf Group who told us that in those early days:
There was a huge argument. A huge opposition to the whole idea of Canary Wharf
being built here on the docks. The local community wanted the docks to stay open,
they never thought the docks should have been closed in the first place, they didn’t
like the global forces that led to that happening and they didn’t like the specific,
local, what they saw as very poor management of the docks, that led to the docks
closing. The announcement, and then start of work on the Canary Wharf project was
the final admission that this, that this is never going to be an industrial area again,
the docks are never going to reopen, the industry is never going to come back, you
know, it was, to the local community it seemed like central government had given up,
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on all the things that they’d been trying to do, and now this was something
completely different and they would have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Over time, the company developed relationships with the organised local community and
they were strategically savvy in appointing Peter Wade, the Chair of the Association of
Island Communities (a key community organisation on the Isle of Dogs where Canary Wharf
is located), to work for them as their first Head of Public Affairs. In what was seen by many
as a classic case of poacher-‐turned-‐gamekeeper, our respondent told us that Peter was “not
a representative of the company in the local community … [but] the representative of the
local community inside the company.” Wade stayed with the company for 18 years until his
retirement, acting as “a useful internal check on how we do business.” While he suffered
considerable hostility from some local residents for taking on the role, Wade’s presence was
testament to the power of the local community and the extent to which the company had
to engage with them in order to be able to work on the Isle of Dogs.
While the organised local community were initially hostile, and powerful enough to win
recognition and a serious response from the corporate developers, our research exposed
the way that opposition had declined over time. In part, this is due to the way in which
people like Peter Wade brokered relationships between the development and the
community, and the benefits secured for local community projects. More prosaically, it is
also a product of time whereby people have got used to the development that has taken
root in their midst. But perhaps most importantly, the community itself has also changed
over this time. A new generation of Islanders has come to adulthood during the years that
the Wharf has been built. None of them has memories of the docks and associated
community life, and many of them have had to move further east to buy their own family-‐
sized homes. Furthermore, middle-‐class professionals – many of whom work at Canary
Wharf – have moved into the small private flats that have been built around the area in a
myriad of new developments. To date, this population has been less organised than the
more established groups but as numbers and capacity have grown, this new community is
also playing a part in the evolution of corporate-‐community relationships.
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Describing the impact of on-‐going demographic shifts on corporate-‐community
relationships, the representative from Canary Wharf Group told us that their work had
changed considerably “from being a … relatively two-‐way conversation between a new
economic heart for the local area and the people who really wanted the old economic heart
back ... [to being] a more complicated sort of multi-‐faceted relationship with the whole
community.” In addition, the research highlighted the way that relationships between
companies and community-‐based organisations had matured over time. As intimated
above, many companies were looking to focus their investment in particular areas of activity
working with specific organisations, often for the very long term.
We uncovered one very striking example of this in the education sector. During the mid-‐
2000s, one Tower Hamlets secondary school, faced with closure, had appointed a new Head
Teacher in order to turn the school around. As part of his brief, he sought to build an
alliance of interested parties to help develop the school. Working with Queen Mary
University of London, the Local Authority and the local Education Business Partnership, he
made contact with a senior manager at a City-‐based insurance company and started to
develop a strong relationship that remains to this day. The company made a board-‐level
decision to work with the school and has since had staff sitting on the Foundation Trust and
the school’s governing body. They also provide facilities for school staff away-‐days, advise
the school on a range of activities including branding and marketing, offer training to school
staff (including the team that welcomes people into the school), provide volunteers who
come into the school to support reading and enterprise, and contribute financially to the
Foundation Trust.
While this school had relationships with a number of other large corporations in Canary
Wharf and beyond – to support an enterprise scheme, IT training and help with
presentation skills, mentoring for students doing GCSEs and in the sixth form – their prime
corporate relationship was with the City-‐based firm that had been there from the start. This
relationship was described as a ‘partnership’ as the school and the corporation were
invested in the success of each other. Interestingly, the school respondent highlighted the
way in which the partnership had encouraged them to think more carefully about their core
values and the way they interacted with the local community. Talking about their
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experience, this respondent reflected that the relationship had made them “a stronger
organisation [as] we feel like an organisation that’s got the benefits of some very committed
friends.”
A number of community organisations argued that they needed long term investment to
secure their services and to make a more meaningful impact in the communities they serve.
As one respondent from a health-‐focused project told us: “Our fundamental purpose is …
empowerment and [that] is often about confidence building. It’s often about the soft side of
how you support people. It’s often about long journeys … so we’re not about a three year
government programme or indeed, a two year CSR relationship. Our relationships go back
generations now … in some … [of the] families that we’ve been working with. That doesn’t
lend itself to the kinds of outcomes that people sometimes want to see with their money.” As
a result, they had sought to cultivate strong relationships with corporate funders to ensure
they understood what they were doing, and appreciated the need for stability and long term
funding. If such long term funding relationships were not possible for particular projects,
they would work with a potential funder to develop new project ideas in the hope that
those would take off. This organisation reported that in the year of interview only 5% of
their funding was coming from the Local Authority (a dramatic decline from rates in the
past) and an increasing amount of their financial support was coming from corporate
sources.
The community organisations and educational representatives we spoke to certainly felt it
was worthwhile for them to engage with companies not only in financial terms in relation to
securing grants for projects, but also in terms of changing the perceptions and aspirations of
people living in east London. As one respondent from a primary school in Tower Hamlets
noted in relation to their ‘learning partner’ volunteers from a large bank: “it’s worthwhile
and the children get a lot from that half an hour of one-‐to-‐one with someone who is not a
teacher or a family member. It’s about aspirations, about children knowing that it will be
possible to move ahead. And about the children not being intimidated by the people in suits
who they see getting off the tubes every day.” However, as we outline below, this
engagement is also not without its risks. While some community groups are better able to
negotiate what they want from corporate relationships than they were in the past, this is
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still not straight-‐forward. As one health-‐related organisation noted: “We’re … slightly less
caught in the headlights with corporates than perhaps we were once,” further reporting that
the community organization takes a much harder line with them in terms of agreeing and
fulfilling the terms of engagement.
Mediating institutions
Brokering organisations such as the East London Business Association (ELBA), the newly
merged and renamed East End Community Foundation (formed from the Isle of Dogs
Community Foundation and the St Katherine and Shadwell Trust), Newham and Tower
Hamlets Education Business Partnerships and City Link, to name a few, have grown up in
London over the past two decades and grapple with similar issues to the companies and the
community over CSR activities. While each corporation we covered had their own projects
and relationships with the local community, a number of brokering organisations also acted
as intermediaries to foster and manage corporate-‐community relations. As one respondent
from a brokering agency reported: “We are sort of professional enough to work with the
businesses and we are approachable enough, you know, for the voluntary sector to want to
come to us to ask questions and advice. So that is what works with us and that is ... the sort
of glue that keeps it together in that sense”. Such intermediation allows both corporate and
community organisations to mitigate their risks and to effectively inform and translate the
issues from both sides. For example, for one of the brokerages, it was clear that community
engagement “drives value for their [corporate] business” and it was their job to convince
them of this value on the ground.
Another key role of the brokering organisations was in highlighting the needs of the
community in the first place. This can be especially important for raising awareness of the
nature of deprivation in east London. One of these brokers recalled how they organise
“seeing is believing” tours for trustees and potential corporates to various projects to
highlight the impact they can have. They also stop at a local housing estate in Poplar for
what they call “the shock value”; “we let them have a good look and then explain, you know,
how many people live on the estate, how many people are unemployed. I think it’s just a real
eye-‐opener for people because they commute in and out of Canary Wharf ... To take them
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out of the beauty of Canary Wharf to the reality of Tower Hamlets has been really effective
for us”.
Once relationships with corporates were more developed, the brokers would then help in
placing volunteers. One broker told us that they placed 14,500 corporate volunteers from
up to 100 member companies in the previous year, supporting a wide variety of schools and
community organisations in east London (and the geographical reach of this work is
illustrated in Figure 2). In addition, brokers helped to ensure that local people could access
jobs in certain sectors such as cleaning, securing preferential access to the recruitment
process. For example, one respondent noted:
Recruitment’s always difficult ... the benefits of utilising [a broker] are they help us
with the recruitment process, so there’s a big saving for us because it saves my
manager’s time in recruiting if these guys will help us get the application forms done,
or whatever we need to do. Also [it’s] about aligning our goals with the client’s as
well.
We found that the evolution and maturing of these types of organisations and their alliances
has meant that brokers are increasingly delivering their own projects alongside their various
matching services, volunteering placements and grant-‐making. This reflects the shift among
the companies noted above towards developing their own relationships in the community,
rendering the liaison services redundant. One broker organisation noted that they had
begun to deliver projects directly several years earlier as a strategic decision to keep afloat:
It was definitely the right thing for us to do ... it has definitely kept a lot of the
corporates on board who would now be saying ‘well we don’t give money. We are
not looking to give money for grant-‐making’. Certainly, the comments that are
coming through now [are] ... ‘How can we work with you because we are about to
change our criteria and we are not really funding third parties or brokers. What can
we do with you?’ Oh, so fund one of our employability projects then.
Despite some changes, the brokers continue to play an important role in facilitating the links
between corporations and communities in east London. This is especially the case among
smaller organisations. One representative from a well-‐established group told us: “the
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principal area where they bring real value is … for smaller charities …[that’s] where that
brokerage service is really, is really important”. Indeed, some community organisations
discussed how new brokers were also being established but not without problems. Mainly
as a result of the diversity of the existing partnerships, new brokers often found that their
approaches were not appropriate. One primary school respondent recalled how a new
broker had come to them to try to develop a relationship with a bank with whom they had
been working for several years: “They had jumped on the band wagon without knowing
anything about the community and the relationships already established. I said, I’ve already
got a relationship with them thank you.”
As well as the emergence of different brokers to mediate the corporate-‐community
relations, other networks have emerged to support CSR professionals in terms of promoting
best practice, setting standards and disseminating information. These include the City
Networking Group, Heart of the City and the London Benchmarking Group. Such networks
are important in promoting inter-‐company engagement and sharing best practice in CSR.
CSR in east London: (historical) geography matters
All of our corporate respondents were acutely aware of the responsibility that accompanied
their geographical position in London’s east end. The juxtaposition of rich and poor was
particularly stark, reinforcing a moral duty to act. As the respondent from Canary Wharf
Group put it: “Charity begins at home [and] your first responsibility is to the people who are
looking up at your big building.” As this respondent continued, people needed a moral
licence to move to the area saying:
to have a licence to operate, a moral licence to operate, in a place like this, to put,
you know, people earning, being paid (whether they earn it or not is another
question), but being paid a million pounds plus a year, in a great big shiny American-‐
style office building, in what is statistically one of the poorest boroughs in the United
Kingdom, and within close walking distance of some of the poorest, you know, I
think, four of the top ten poorest wards in the UK are in Tower Hamlets … you have to
operate in a certain way.
20
In addition, although it is rarely acknowledged, there is a sense in which Canary Wharf has
had to compete with the City which already had deeply established community-‐based
partners and outreach activities. One community-‐based respondent who had a close
relationship with one of the City Guilds commented on the extent to which “Canary Wharf
measure[s] itself against the City” and that meant having some of the ethos of philanthropy
developed and practised by the companies and organisations in the City.
As such, many of our respondents recognised the particular benefits to communities of
being based in east London. One corporate interviewee described Tower Hamlets as being
unique because:
It’s got so much business support and … everybody here wants to get engaged. There
is not a school in Tower Hamlets that hasn’t got business support, which is unique,
and I think that has contributed, it must have contributed to the outstanding results
that the primary schools get, and increasingly, the secondary schools [too] … Further
east is a different kettle of fish altogether … I think Newham is at a disadvantage as
far as east London is concerned because it doesn’t have as many businesses based in
its locality, and people think of it still as being miles away where it’s [actually] so
close via the Jubilee Line.
The special geographical position of Tower Hamlets was most obviously recognised in
relation to volunteering, as one corporate respondent told us: “if they are close we can get
people to them in the lunch hour. We are starting to bring in youngsters into the bank, that
is good to them as well to see what it’s like but there is a time factor.” Likewise another
community-‐based respondent told us: “one of the big attractions of us … is that we’re local
[and] we’re very visual … it’s not a draughty church hall. This is a nice place to come.” But
such opportunities also had to be realised by the community. One respondent highlighted
the extent to which community leaders had to be open to making relationships and
sustaining activities with their corporate neighbours. Without goodwill, the benefits of
geography could not be realised. Seizing opportunities was clearly important as one school-‐
based respondent explained: “I sort of chortle about the fact that we’re in a wonderful
triangle. We’ve got the Olympic Park, we’ve got Canary Wharf and we’ve got the City, and
we’re right in the middle! … This is where London is happening and we’re there. You can
21
either … passively watch it or engage with it, be excited by it.” With this attitude, the school
was benefiting from a host of relationships and activities that were enhancing its success. A
number of respondents recognised that they needed to tread carefully in developing
relationships with corporations and they sought to avoid dealing with controversial
companies (for example, those involved in arms or tobacco) and to avoid those that are not
involved for mutual and long term benefit, but they were also open to the opportunities
posed by their geographical proximity to major corporations.
However, the immediacy of opportunities for corporate philanthropy close to the Canary
Wharf development is not the only explanation for the extensive evidence of community
engagement revealed by this study. The east end of London has long been recognised as a
site of poverty and inequality as well as an area ripe for philanthropic intervention and
regeneration, stretching back to the nineteenth century and before. While respondents
typically articulated the emergence of current community needs as linked to the decline of
the docks and subsequent regeneration processes that marginalised local people, the idea
of the east end as a place of longstanding social and economic problems clearly informed
contemporary philanthropic engagements. As the Canary Wharf Group respondent put it:
This part of London has always been poor. It was poor … before the docks came, you
know, it was outside the walls of the city, so it was where the poor people lived who
serviced the city in the Sixteenth Century and Seventeenth Century. When the docks
came at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the docks brought their own
intensification of housing, but, you know, it was a very, very poor area. You know,
Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper. You know, Limehouse, was the sort of opium dens, the
original Chinatown. This … has always been a poor area, and when Canary Wharf
came, it was poor in a different way. Instead of being incredibly dense and incredibly
highly populated but very, very economically active, when Canary Wharf came along,
actually, it was probably at its economically least active point.
Although seemingly unaware of the history of extensive philanthropic engagement within
east London in the Victorian period – albeit driven largely efforts individual visionaries like
Thomas Barnardo or Angela Burdett Coutts rather than by companies – the concerns of
current CSR professionals echo these historical antecedents, especially in their focus on
22
young people’s education and training, and the health of local populations. Several of our
interviewees pointed to the history of immigration to the east end as important to
understanding its contemporary distinctiveness as a diverse and dynamic community. As
one of the respondents from a brokering organisation put it, “once again the community of
Tower Hamlets is changing, like it has done for the last 400 years … I think people really
engage with that and they can kind of see it.” Because of its demographic complexion,
working in east London offers corporations opportunities for progressive engagement with
diversity. As the same interviewee remarked, “I think it’s about the complex need and the
complexity of communities” enabling CSR schemes not only to tackle issues of poverty, but
also of discrimination and exclusion. So while the focus of corporate philanthropy and
community engagement in east London can partly be explained by its proximity to Canary
Wharf and the City, it is also clear that the area’s distinctiveness as a particular kind of place
– as a part of London where it is well known that people have struggled for decades against
longstanding poverty and environmental problems, as a site of social and ethnic diversity,
and as a locality where there is a tradition of state, civil society and private interest all
pursuing creative and radical agendas aimed at improving the lives of those who live there –
draws contemporary CSR programmes to the east end.
For their part, the corporates were realistic about their ability to end poverty in east
London, even though it was their proximity to poverty that drove them to act. Many
dismissed the power of ‘trickle-‐down’ to make a significant difference to life in east London
but they did argue about the importance of influencing particular people at specific stages
of life – and this was especially true in relation to their work in schools. One corporate
respondent recognised the persistent ‘gap’ between local people and the Canary Wharf
complex, describing her experiences with young people in schools right next to the Wharf.
She argued that:
there’s a complete disengagement between the local kids and the local communities
and this place [Canary Wharf] … It’s fantastic to work here. It’s fabulous because it’s
completely geared to work, but the shops are all really expensive … This is very much
a little island and I think you can’t operate in this kind of business place without being
seen publicly to be doing something to help people connect with it.
23
Historically, the pattern has been that longer term residents have gradually seen their
fortunes – or the fortunes of their children – improve and they have then moved further
east, out of the area, leaving space for a new group of incomers. Changes in the regulation
of social housing and the provision of expensive private housing might alter these dynamics
in the future. As a respondent from one of the brokers explained: “Regeneration doesn’t
stop, it evolves.”
Sustainable partnerships between corporations and communities
Although the research found that communities located near to Canary Wharf and the City
are clearly benefiting by developing strategic connections with their powerful neighbours, it
also raises a number of questions about sustainability. Although the health-‐oriented
organisation stated that their partnerships with corporates often allowed them to “drive
innovation” through experimentation which often led to long-‐term change, this situation
appears to be shifting. Indeed, as noted above, representatives of several community
organisations and schools reported that a move towards more targeted assistance, focused
on particular areas, could have negative effects on their activities. A clear example was
provided by the primary school respondent who had a partnership with an investment bank
over seven years which allowed her school to access £25,000 per year for a range of
activities linked with expanding educational opportunities. However, the shift towards
getting young people back to work meant that they lost this funding in 2012. Although the
bank continues to run a volunteering programme in the school, the annual grant has been
stopped.
The increasing shift towards measuring the outcomes of partnerships was also identified as
a challenge for some organisations and schools, and was linked with the narrowing of
targets and priorities. In a hypothetical discussion about whether a bank would support a
teenage pregnancy project in Tower Hamlets or vaccinate 5,000 children in Africa, the
respondent noted: “There’s no contest really, [they] … are definitely going to save lives. And
again, it makes them feel good ... it’s about them wanting to know what they’re going to
get. It’s not just about branding, they want to say ‘We saved 5,000 lives’”. Funding the
teenage pregnancy project was further hindered by the sensitive subject matter. One
24
broker’s representative recalled that when she spoke to a bank about funding this project
they were very reluctant:
‘Oh, teenage pregnancy, no don’t ask us anything about smoking either or drugs.’
There is a street work programme on the Island and it’s really good and it’s engaging
with young people about HIV and AIDS and drug awareness. They were like ‘Oh no’ ...
they don’t want their company associated with that. I know they have given smaller
donations, but definitely don’t want any publicity associated with it.
Sustainability is also affected by the role of specific individuals within companies who
champion particular causes and projects. If these individuals move on, then any particular
stream of funding could be put in jeopardy. Sustained engagement can also be undermined
by the failure of a particular project after which funds cease to flow. The primary school
respondent discussed a ‘failed’ project with a financial institution where they worked on
providing IT in the classroom. Despite trying to get the project up and running for three
years, they eventually gave up after the demands from the institution in relation to the need
for specific lesson plans, use of Powerpoint and so on, became too onerous for her teaching
staff.
Into the future, the controversy over the potential mismatch between meeting local needs
with demands from corporates in a sustainable way remains an issue. This was exemplified
by the health-‐related community organisation whose representative discussed how
companies are not always able or willing to address the most pressing issues affecting east
London, especially in relation to immigration: “You know, we’ve got a lot of new immigrants
arriving and new arrivals … There’s a whole generation of women actually, 40 plus women ...
Are we going to write them off for the rest of their lives and say they’re never going to
engage with British culture? Well no, but actually there’s no money to fund this stuff.”
Interestingly, however, this respondent noted that the trusts and foundations had
recognised these needs, but that the corporates were much less keen to engage with this or
what he referred to as “the world that’s now emerging around real poverty, real
deprivation”.
25
Economic downturn and partnerships
Another potential threat to the sustainability of corporate-‐community partnerships and CSR
funding has been the recent financial crisis and economic downturn. Interestingly, although
there was some evidence of a reduction in volunteering numbers because of wider
workforce redundancies, respondents from both corporations and communities were
remarkably upbeat. Interrogated about the impact of the economic downturn on activity,
for example, one corporate respondent told us: “If anything, we have increased our
activities since we realised the growing pressures and needs of our local partners. Having
worked hard to build relationships, we want to ensure our partners survive and succeed.”
The company valued their relationships and, while they reviewed their CSR activities on a
regular basis, they planned to sustain this work for the long term.
Perceived increased needs following the economic downturn were identified most
commonly as youth unemployment and legal aid. In relation to the latter, one respondent
from a law firm told us that they were expanding their pro bono work (they already had a
target for each lawyer to do 50 hours pro bono work per annum) as well as increasing
funding to law centres: “I was advised of a law centre that we know, just this morning, [that]
their subsidy from the government has been cut from £1.3 million to £800,000 and yet their
increased need is going to double in the next year.”
One area where there had been a change as a result of the crisis related to how the financial
institutions in particular chose to communicate their community engagement activities in
relation to branding. Several community respondents reported that banks in particular had
taken their branding off activities. As one stated: “before the crash, the market crash,
branding was definitely a big thing that they wanted to be recognised for everything they do.
Since the crash, not so much ... I think they’re just trying to be out of the limelight.”
Linked with addressing increasing need, as intimated above, many of the community
respondents also highlighted a move towards longer term, more embedded, partnership
working in recent years, and this approach should help to sustain community-‐facing services
into the future. Certainly, one of the school-‐based respondents told us that they had a
“deep partnership that can take the good times and the bad times and we’ll work through
26
it.” Similarly, another respondent from a community-‐based health project highlighted the
way that their relationships with companies had become much more long term. He told us
they were: “trying to create meaningful partnerships … [where] there’s more money
involved, more corporate volunteering involved, [and] they tend to be looking not just for
flash-‐in-‐the-‐pan, quick one year impact, [but] much more into doing stuff for the long term.”
This gave the community organisations greater security about the work than they might
have had in the past. Moreover, they had much lighter touch reporting requirements than
was usual with public sector funding, making the cost of running the services much less
expensive. As the same respondent explained, “corporate relationships usually require a fair
bit of management, but what they don’t require is intrusive monitoring and reporting.”
However, the research also found that there were no certainties, and in an economy based
on relationships, a change in personnel or priorities could put any particular stream of
funding in jeopardy. Community respondents certainly reported that they could identify
growing need in their community, and as austerity began to bite, this would only increase.
The hope is that communities have the long-‐term relationships with companies that can
bridge the shortfall in state funding and meet increasing demand. As one of the broker-‐
respondents suggested: “I think there is a general consensus that people should take
responsibility for the local communities in which they are a part, whether it is by virtue of
working or living there.” If so, the reliance on corporate funding is only likely to grow, and
this can only succeed by working in tandem with local community organisations and people.
Conclusion
In the early years of the regeneration of the Isle of Dogs, the first Chair of the London
Docklands Development Corporation, Sir Nigel Broackes, famously remarked that ‘we are
not a welfare association but a property-‐based organisation offering good value’. His
intervention in 1982 angered many in the local community who were opposed to the ‘free
market’ approach to regeneration that was being followed by Margaret Thatcher’s
government. Thirty years later, his vision of property-‐led regeneration as about generating
commercial profit rather than meeting the needs of local people seems at odds with the
substantial evidence of wide ranging and deeply embedded corporate philanthropy
initiatives that we have found in this study. The history of the Canary Wharf development
27
suggests that over time strong relationships can be built between corporations and local
community organisations, reducing the friction between welfare and profit, and shaping the
development of people and place. Particularly in the area of the education, training and the
mentoring of young people, corporations are deeply engaged in the well-‐being of
communities and localities in east London. Many of these relationships are mature and both
parties are firmly committed to working together into the future, seeking a positive impact
on the lives of those they are trying to support. Indeed, we would argue that ‘corporate
welfare’ has become a significant additional strand of the increasingly complex assemblage
of private corporations, state institutions, voluntary bodies, community organisations and
individuals whose interventions and support underpin livelihoods in east London.
However, while not diminishing the positive impacts that corporate philanthropy and
community engagement have brought to east London, the risks associated with the growing
penetration and increasing reliance upon multinational corporations as a provider of
welfare and support are manifold. Here we have highlighted the issues of sustainability, the
selectivity of corporate initiatives and the wider uncertainty caused by the shifting economic
climate and austerity. However, two broader questions emerge as a consequence of this
study. The first concerns the way that the state – especially local government, which
seemed marginal to the many initiatives and activities discussed by our respondents –
should engage with and seek to co-‐ordinate its own work with that of CSR programmes. The
findings of this study of east London suggest that there has already been a fundamental
shift in the way that private companies interact with local public institutions and service
providers. Where does this leave the state and how might it reconfigure its role to make
room for greater corporate community engagement? However, the second question that
emerges from this study relates to the particularity of east London and the extent to which
this reconfiguration is being experienced elsewhere. While it might be tempting to argue
that ‘corporate welfare’ is set to transform the provision of education and welfare services
in the contemporary United Kingdom, this ignores the unique level of engagement that is
evident in the specific part of east London that has been the principal focus of this study. As
many of our interviewees acknowledged -‐ and as Figures 1 and 2 reveal -‐ the spatial scope
of corporate beneficence in east London is relatively localised, centring on the borough of
Tower Hamlets and the ‘inner’ or ‘old’ east end. Beyond the River Lea and further afield in
28
Greater London evidence of engagement appears to be patchier. While further research is
needed to understand the full extent of corporate community engagement, in areas of the
UK where there is not a concentration of multi-‐national corporations with large CSR budgets
and committed personnel, the prospect of private enterprise supporting the needs of local
people seems limited. Nevertheless, this study has cast light on an important metropolitan
trend where, as a consequence of London’s globally-‐oriented, multi-‐national corporation-‐
led financial service economy, the city’s communities and its local welfare regimes are being
reshaped in very significant ways.
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Appendix
Methodological framework
We conducted 10 interviews between October 2012 and April 2013 under conditions of anonymity. Two of these encounters involved two respondents, meaning that we spoke to 12 individuals (7 from not-‐for-‐profit brokers and community-‐based organisations; and 5 professionals working in CSR at Canary Wharf).
An online survey was also conducted with CSR representatives from companies in Canary Wharf and this generated additional data that has helped to inform our analysis.
The maps (Figures 1 and 2) were aggregated from information provided by the companies themselves, records found in corporate Annual and Directors’ reports internet sites, the Charity Commission and data collated by the brokerage organisations.
30
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