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Volunteering for Businesses
“Hearing all the positive feedback on the impact that we had was really rewarding. The experience showcased the power of aligning professional skills with community needs.”
Welcome to Community Southwark’s Volunteering Programme for Businesses
We are building stronger partnerships between businesses and Southwark’s charities and community organisations to create a more impactful and sustainable Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS).
We help our business partners to make the biggest possible impact for their staff and for the charities and community organisations in and around Southwark. We do this by supporting employees and employers to give their time, funds, or other resources such as premises to collaborate with voluntary and community sector organisations for social impact.
Volunteering for Employees
We love having business partners join us in our work with the community and we offer a range of options for employee volunteering contributions. At Community Southwark we specialise in delivering practical team challenge days and design bespoke skills & knowledge sharing volunteering opportunities. The aim is to find synergy between community needs and the skills and time our business partners can offer through their employee volunteering.
Our Services Include:
Team Away Day Challenges
Your team will be led by one of our skilled facilitators at one of our community partners where they will make practical improvements that help the host organisation to do their work more effectively. This could be, for example, creating more growing space at a community garden that donates food to local food banks, or creating new play structures at an adventure playground for children in deprived areas, or redecorating a local youth centre. We offer a complete service that allows your team to make the maximum impact for an amazing community organisation.
Please note: we operate a charge for this service. Contact Conor at involve@communitysouthwark.org to learn more.
Skills & Knowledge Sharing Volunteering
There is a huge need for organisations to receive training in all different areas and to receive it from experts like yourselves. We will work with you and your colleagues to identify how the professional skills and expertise within your business can be harnessed to help transform the work of our community partners, by running a skills-sharing workshop to share your knowledge. Examples could be:
- Managing impact –Support organisations to show their funders and stake funders what they do and the impact they make
- Fundraising – How to organise finances, how best to fundraise
- Databases, CRM – Managing data, volunteers, information in a modern and systematic way
- Strategic support – General strategic support
These workshops could be delivered online, at your office, in our office, for one hour, half a day or a full day – we’re flexible!
We do not charge for this service. Contact Izzy at involve@communitysouthwark.org or 020 3848 6540 to learn more.
Individual Volunteering
Employees looking to apply for individual volunteering roles can register on our Community Southwark Volunteer Platform. It is home to hundreds of volunteering roles from charities and community groups across Southwark.
We do not charge for this service. Contact volunteering@communitysouthwark.org or 020 3848 6540 if you have any questions.
Other ways to support
Premises
One of the greatest challenges facing the VCS in Southwark is access to affordable space for their work – whether that’s a permanent office, one-off event space or regular meeting rooms. Community Southwark is working on a project to match charities with suitable space, so if you have any offices, meeting rooms or other areas that you could offer to our members, please let us know via our website: https://communitysouthwark.org/premises-matching-project/.
Learning
Download our guide to employee volunteering or read our about how to get started in five simple steps.
Donations
Donate to Funding Differently, a grants programme led by Community Southwark, Partnership Southwark (NHS), United St Saviour’s Charity, Peter Minet Trust and the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS). By joining this partnership, you’ll be supporting a proven, community-led model that reaches underfunded groups, builds equity into funding, and backs the people closest to the issues. Read more about the programme and how the latest grants have improved the health of Southwark communities here.
We are also keen to hear from you if you could donate office furniture, supplies or other materials to our members.
Or, could you sponsor our annual Southwark Stars Volunteer Celebratory Event? Or our annual Community Southwark AGM?
Get in touch..
If you would like to have a chat to explore how we could work together and add value to your company’s volunteering programmes, or you simply have a question you’d like to ask, please do get in touch: involve@communitysouthwark.org or 020 3848 6540.
Are you a VCS organisation looking for support from a business?
Please speak to one of our team to discuss your organisation’s ability/capacity to host a potential Team Challenge on your site AND/OR whether you require skills-sharing support from a local business.