6 minute read
THE DIFFERENCE MAKERS
Introducing the people behind Marylebone’s vital charities and community organisations: Penny Alexander, chief executive of the Baker Street Quarter Partnership
Interview: Jean-Paul Aubin-Parvu Portraits: Orlando Gili
The Baker Street Quarter Partnership is a not-for-profit body funded and directed by local businesses, but with an agenda that caters to everyone. Our job is to make sure that this area is a really positive place for the whole community – residents, workers and visitors.
We do that in three ways. The first is to make the environment around us clean, safe and welcoming. How do we ensure that it looks after people’s wellbeing? How do we make it as accessible as possible? How do we keep it vibrant and fun? The second is about promoting and supporting the area to ensure its future vitality. It has done well during the current period of change, but we can’t be complacent. We need to be proactive and keep driving it forward.
The third way is to nurture a connected and caring community and have a positive social and environmental impact. Our Smarter Giving programme is central to this strand. Our business members really want to make a difference. Smarter Giving is about harnessing their resources and helping them do good in the places where there’s most need.
We focus our efforts on the Lisson Grove and Church Street Ward areas, just north of Marylebone Road. When we launched Smarter Giving 10 years ago, many local businesses had no idea there was an area right on their doorstep that is fantastic but also has some significant social and economic challenges. Corporate giving often has a national or international reach, but meeting a need within your own neighbourhood means you can engage in a more immediate and tangible way. You can make a difference in person.
My colleague Kate Heslegrave heads up the programme and spends her time getting to know the local grassroots charities, community groups and schools, developing those relationships and finding out what support is needed. >
That support can come in any number of forms, including volunteering, mentoring, fundraising, donating goods and services, and offering work experience.
For example, we work with a couple of care homes for older people, and one of our projects is to organise day trips for residents. Local businesses will either fund the trip or have employees coming along as volunteers. We have been to places like Windsor and the seaside, and they’re always a great day out. An accountancy firm, BDO, provides monthly entertainment at one of the care homes, organising bingo, music and other really fun activities.
We work closely with some of the local charity nurseries. One of them had a disused roof garden that needed redoing, so we reached out to one of our building managers. He rallied together his contractors and they went up and did the work, including installing a vegetable garden so that the kids and their families could learn about growing food. We also regularly launch appeals for clothing, food and toys, just getting those out to the people who really need them.
Over the years we’ve worked on various projects with a women’s hostel. One of my favourites involved Howdens, the kitchen company, whose head office is in the area. We brokered a donation of a fully functioning industrial kitchen for the hostel, which now runs a food enterprise business from that kitchen as both a fundraising platform and a place for women to develop work skills. They’ve sold some of their delicious bakes at our food market, which is lovely for us because we get to sample them!
Local businesses sometimes donate goods – for example, hotels donating bedding and crockery through one of the homelessness charities to support people who are setting up their first homes. We sometimes have furniture donated by companies after they refurbish or move premises. This often goes into some of the youth centres. Some of the hotels have been great at running recruitment drives, trying to get local people into local jobs, which is a real passion of ours. It also makes practical sense. A lot of jobs in the hospitality industry require you to work quite late, so it’s actually really helpful if you’re local.
We promote Smarter Giving to our members constantly. The main reason it was set up in the first place was because we had lots of businesses saying that they wanted to contribute but didn’t know where to start. “How do we find these local charities? How do we find where we can make a difference?” Our members still get in touch with us directly, and we also highlight success stories in our newsletter and other communications.
Kate is particularly good at understanding what each business can give that’s of most value. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s skills. Sometimes it’s goods. Kate will store that information, and when she’s out in the community looking at where the need is, she then reaches back out to make those links. And if a charity comes to us with a particular need, we notify the business community via our circulation list, then help set everything up. Another key part of Kate’s role is the follow up, making sure that the brokerage is successful and that the relationship is what it needs to be.
The Portman Estate is a founder member of the Baker Street Quarter Partnership. They’ve always been highly responsive to call outs from our Smarter Giving programme and very generous in funding local initiatives. They adopted a local homelessness charity, West London Mission, as their charity partner for three years. They’ve provided funding for playgrounds, a green wall to shield a local school, and day trips for the elderly. Their teams have also volunteered on day trips and wrapped Christmas presents for children in hospital. They are also good at mobilising their contractors to help, including a recent SOS for a handyman from the women’s homelessness shelter, and during the pandemic they helped to get drivers for the food bank.
We were quite overwhelmed with businesses wanting to help during the pandemic. The food bank had to expand massively and start making home deliveries. They needed crates to pack all the food in, and we were able to get the local Co-op to donate some. We then had our waste provider and one of the local electricians delivering the food.
We also had businesses step up to provide stationery and laptops for children who needed them for remote learning. West 1 Physio ran online exercise classes for the elderly from the day centre, which had to close its doors. This was a really important way for them to keep in touch, albeit virtually, while also getting some exercise. We were also able to get some of the property owners to find parking spaces for frontline health workers, while businesses donated wellbeing packs and vouchers to nurses and doctors. And there were huge financial donations made to both the food bank and the St Mungo’s homeless charity during that period.
Smarter Giving has grown beyond our wildest expectations. More and more businesses have got involved and we’ve had 650 volunteers come through the programme. I think it’s essential that businesses make a positive difference to the local area. They have the resources. They can afford to put something back into the community. But there are also self-motivated reasons for them. They need to attract talented staff, and there are lots of people who want to feel attached not only to their job but to their community. That sense of belonging is really important. Everyone benefits. That’s the beauty of this.
SMARTER GIVING Baker Street Quarter Partnership 64 Baker Street, W1U 7DF bakerstreetq.co.uk
