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. 

We love having business partners join us in our work with the community and we offer a range of options for employee volunteering contributions. 

Volunteering for Employees 

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

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, an example of this could be 

• Managing impact –Support organisations to show their funders and stake funders what they do and the impact they make
• Website design and impact – Tools, resources and understanding of how best to utilise your website, what messaging you use and how
• 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, it can be flexible. We do not charge for this service.

You can read a case study about skills-sharing volunteering here: Corporate Volunteering Spotlight: Katie Harvard Taylor – Community Southwark  

Contact Izzy at involve@communitysouthwark.org or 020 3848 6540 to explore your options or ask a question!

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/vcs-support/resources/venues/premises-matching-project/.

Donations  

We are also keen to hear from you if you could donate office furniture, supplies or other materials to our members.  

Could you sponsor our annual Southwark Stars  Volunteer Celebratory Event?

Donate toward our annual Community Southwark AGM or help us host more events for our members?

Donate to Funding Differently, a grants programme led by Community Southwark, Partnership Southwark (NHS), United St Saviour’s Charity and the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS). The unique initiative puts small charities and community groups at the heart of funding decisions. Co-designed by the Voluntary & Community Sector in Southwark, the approach shifts power, strengthens local organisations, and tackles health inequalities at a neighbourhood level. Read more about the programme and how the latest grants have improved the health of Southwark communities here.

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.

Learn more about the partnerships taking place across Southwark

Sign up to our Community & Business Partnership Newsletter

Events and training page

Our Impact 2023/24

Corporate and Community Project Year One Report