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Opinion:

Jun 07, 2022

Supporting our Communities Makes Good Business Sense

By Dr Nik Kotecha OBE DL, Chair of Trustees for the Randal Charitable Foundation

Throughout my working life I’ve always been passionate about businesses giving-back to the communities they work in and serve through their corporate social responsibility endeavours.

In particular, I’m a firm believer that businesses and charities can benefit from each other, and I am an advocate of investing in CSR and ensuring my companies are good corporate citizens.

Businesses can help charities improve the skills of their people, and provide essential entrepreneurial and business knowledge to help them build their own sustainable income generating models.

Whereas charities offer businesses wider benefits associated with enhancing brand and engaging their people.

Water for Kids is supported by the Randal Charitable Foundation

The Business-Charity Perspective

My company, Morningside Pharmaceuticals, has been investing in CSR for many years.

We have also, for more than three decades, been supplying a wide range of quality UK medicines via international Aid Organisations to the developing world. So I have seen first-hand the importance of Private and Third Sector collaborations to ensuring that people living in lower-middle income countries receive quality highly-regulated medicines.

For us, CSR is about the culture, ethos and identity of our business, which has been built around our mission of ‘making quality healthcare an affordable and accessible reality throughout the world.’ To this end we feel it’s important that our CSR activity lives and breathes our corporate values.

It’s also important that senior management teams lead on CSR activity and view it as part of a package connected to raising brand awareness, engagement of people, motivating employees and recruitment. These activities then feed into raising the whole image of the organisation and feed into KPIs, which will involve colleagues throughout the organisation.

Supporting charities also chimes with people’s personal values, which act as a motivating factor for a company’s employees, while making a positive contribution to society and the wider-world.

Another key area where charities add real value is recruitment of talent. People become aware of a business’ charitable activities and see those businesses as great places to work. This is particularly important in the East Midlands where there is a well publicised skills shortage, particularly in high level manufacturing.

Working with charities also involves people in a ‘common cause’ which is great for team building and bringing your people together under a shared mission.

The Impact of Collaborations

Alongside my business journey, I have also been fortunate to see the importance of collaborations from the other side; through my work with the Randal Charitable Foundation, which I founded with my wife Moni in 2017.

The Foundation provides grant funding to directly save lives and significantly improve the quality of life of people living in the UK and globally, with an aspiration to directly save 1 million lives globally. The Foundation’s core focus areas are addiction, health, mental health, poverty and education for the vulnerable.

In 2019, the Foundation moved towards public affairs activity by funding research through the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) to lobby Government around the challenges of addiction in the UK. Through our work with the CSJ and Dame Carol Black, we helped secure almost £900m in additional Government funding for drug treatment services in England.

It was the biggest increase in funding for drug treatment services in 15 years and was, in large part, made possible through research and lobbying partly funded by the Randal Charitable Foundation.

What our experience with the CSJ showed us is that, by thoughtful investment in certain strategic campaigns, we can leverage activity so it moves from charities and NGOs to Governments.

This benefits not just the individuals themselves, but their families, their communities, the businesses they work for and society as a whole.

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"The future depends on what we do in the present."

"Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier."

“The unprepared mind cannot see the outstretched hand of opportunity.”

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”

"How very little can be done under the spirit of fear."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

“Success is never found. Failure is never fatal. Courage is the only thing.”