Our new equality, diversity and inclusion committee was established and raised awareness of issues our customers, colleagues and communities are facing. We’ve also increased, and will continue to increase, representation across our customer-based committees. We want to make sure that the voice of our customer is central to what we do; to do that, we need to make sure we’re representing our communities.
When lockdown began, we weren’t able to continue with many of the community and employment-based activities we’d planned. But we were in a strong place to adapt how we deliver them, focussing on partnership working, supporting local hubs to distribute supplies, food and more. We also leveraged additional funding to support activities and awarded community grants.
Within six weeks of the first national lockdown, our employment, support and training services were changed to 100% online. Continuing to give essential assistance, connecting people to employers and job opportunities. But we didn’t stop there. We introduced weekly, live, online wellbeing, confidence and employment webinars too.
We continued to support essential services during this time. We forged relationships with our communities and partners to identify what extra support was needed. And then we used our hyper-local approach to shape and deliver our response.
Our community cafés were turned into food distribution hubs. The teams worked with local authority partners, volunteers and FareShare to deliver and distribute over 2,000 meals to support schools, essential workers, and vulnerable residents. We provided funding to food banks, community centres, and social enterprises to support our communities navigating the impact of Covid-19. Café 1759 joined a scheme to reduce food waste, saving an estimated 400 crates of bakery, cakes, fresh fruit, salad, flowers and vegetables from being sent to landfill. We delivered an estimated 3,000 food items, with an approximate value of £7,000, to Bordon Food Bank.
Our Good Grub Club, created to combat food poverty, went online too, with the number of people taking place doubling. And we set up our Buddy Club, a welfare initiative connecting our vulnerable, isolated customers with colleagues through weekly phone calls.
Working together with our customers and partners meant that communities had the support they needed during the pandemic (and continue to, now). But because we had to temporarily pause or adapt services, we weren’t able to measure our social value in the usual way. Our community cafes usually generate a large part of social value, however during the lockdowns we had to close or change the way we operated them. This meant that our social value isn’t where we wanted it to be, and we know we can do better. That’s why we’re going to work with our communities and our supply chain to improve our social value impact.
