The evolution of Diversity and Inclusion in the business sector depends on their engagement with charities and social enterprises

Photo credit: Social Business Trust

At the risk of misappropriating an old John F Kennedy quote, it is hard not to start off this blog post with the pronouncement “ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community.”

It is no secret that large corporations are trying to align themselves with young voices and talent that understand their communities on a local level. One of the raised eyebrows that come as a result of this is the commonly asked question of, “what are these corporations doing to invest in a meaningful way?”

While corporations are making strides to diversify their supply chain and to empower characteristic-based employee resource/affinity groups (ERGs) groups across their organisation/s, Do it Now Now CEO, Bayo Adelaja offers some suggestions of going the (necessary) step further. 

Bayo recently spoke at the London Stock Exchange office at the invitation of the Social Business Trust, where she discussed what large corporations can do to improve their inclusion and employee engagement. 

Through partnering with charities and social enterprises in the following ways, large corporations can invest in culture in a more meaningful way that goes beyond the often reductive method of quick extraction that we so often see. She suggests:

• Create working groups of key charities and social enterprises that align with your ERGs so that they can co-develop their own meaningful and tailored voluntary mechanisms

• Sponsor Charities and Social Enterprises (CSEs) that are working to diversify the pipeline of talent and suppliers coming into your industry

• Provide discretionary money to your Employee resource/affinity groups so that they are empowered to commission/grant CSEs based on processes that they develop themselves

• Support ERGs to champion local issues that they care about in the workplace by creating space for them to highlight the work of their partner CSEs throughout the year

• Consider that CSEs are an important part of your ESG achievements in the external environment - create a mandate that ensures you are not only measuring internal success related to the ESGs but external activities as well.

 Young people are increasingly interested in and want to see more robust local community engagement. So as a business seeking to ready itself for the new generation of workers ask yourself, “how are we contributing to our local community as a corporation operating in it?” 

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