Centre for Public Engagement Mapping corporate philanthropy and community engagement in east London: A research report

Johanna Wadsley, Cathy McIlwaine, Jane Wills, Alastair Owens and Alison Blunt

School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London October 2013 Contents

Acknowledgements 2

Executive summary 3

Introduction 5 The Key Players: Corporations, communities and mediating institutions Corporations 7 The community view 13 Mediating institutions 17 CSR in east London: (historical) geography matters 19 Sustainable partnerships between corporations and communities 23 Economic downturn and partnerships 25 Conclusion 26 Appendix 29

References 30

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Acknowledgements

This project was made possible with funding from the Centre for Public Engagement at Queen Mary University of London to whom we are really grateful. We would like to thank Charlotte Rogers, Melanie Goldsmith and Jon Lloyd who helped us disseminate information about the survey. We are also grateful to Ed Oliver from the School of Geography who drew the maps and produced the cover. Finally, our thanks go to everyone who participated in the research and who remain anonymous.

Cover photograph by Cathy McIlwaine

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Executive summary

This research analyses the evolving relationships between corporations based at Canary Wharf and east London communities over the past 20 years through a focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities.

Corporations are deeply engaged in the well-being of communities in east London, particularly in education, training and the mentoring of young people. But there are significant risks, particularly around sustainability, the selectivity of corporate initiatives and wider economic uncertainty.

The key players Corporations • Whilst the CSR remit of companies at Canary Wharf is national and global, companies are involved in a wide range of CSR work in east London. • Key CSR activities include financial contributions, pro bono services and allocated staff time for volunteering and mentoring. • Working with younger people is the main priority for companies, with an emphasis on education, training and access to employment. • CSR benefits companies in six main ways: o Recruitment of the best graduates o Opportunities for employee development o The potential diversification of staff o Fostering ‘responsible’ corporate culture o Improving client relations o The position and brand of the business • CSR activities are increasingly targeted on particular areas with measurable outcomes to evaluate their impact.

Communities • After initial hostility to the development of Canary Wharf, community organizations in east London now work closely with a range of companies to access CSR resources. • Long-term strong partnerships have developed. • Community organizations value their engagement with companies not only in financial terms but also in changing the perceptions and aspirations of people living in east London. • Corporate-community engagement is not risk-free. Mediating institutions • Key brokering organizations are the East London Business Association (ELBA), the East End Community Foundation, Newham and Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnerships, and City Link.

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• Such organizations highlight the needs of the community, act as intermediaries to foster and manage corporate-community relations, help to place volunteers, and assist in recruiting local people for employment in certain sectors such as cleaning. • Their role has changed over time, with brokering organizations now delivering their own projects alongside facilitating the links between corporations and communities.

CSR in east London • The juxtaposition of rich and poor is stark in east London, reinforcing a moral duty among companies and other actors to act. This echoes Victorian philanthropy. • Community organizations avoid controversial companies and those not involved for mutual and long-term benefit. • CSR work in east London offers corporations opportunities for progressive engagement with diversity. • The spatial scope of CSR centres on Tower Hamlets and the ‘inner’ or ‘old’ east end.

Sustainable partnerships between corporations and communities • The move towards more targeted activities can have a detrimental effect on community organizations • The increasing requirement to measure the outcomes of partnerships is challenging for some community organizations. • Sustainability is affected by the role of specific individuals within companies who champion particular causes and projects. • Companies are not always willing or able to address the most pressing issues affecting east London, especially in relation to immigration and poverty. • But there are also long and sustainable relationships that can generate innovation.

Economic downturn and partnerships • Despite some reduction in volunteering numbers because of workforce redundancies, CSR remains active and positive in east London. • Economic downturn has increased needs such as youth unemployment and legal aid. • Community organizations hope that long-term and embedded relationships with companies can bridge the shortfall in state funding and meet increasing demand.

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Introduction

In just over 20 years Canary Wharf has grown to become a thriving business centre in the heart of east London. The Wharf now employs 100,000 people and is home to some of the largest banks and financial and legal services companies in the world (Canary Wharf Group, 2013). The area is still expanding and plans are laid to continue this growth for the next 20 years. In its early years, the development attracted enormous controversy. At the local level, the strongest voices in the community resisted the arrival of corporate interests and the perceived lack of democratic control over the development. More generally, many academics and journalists saw the development as representing all that was wrong with the emerging political-economic agenda associated with Margaret Thatcher’s governments (Colenutt, 1991; Merrifield, 1993; Pile, 1995). Critics focused on the way that Government circumvented local democracy and planning controls to open up ground for business interests and they saw the development as a physical manifestation of the class conflict that was cleaving the soul of the nation. The communities that had given birth to some of the proudest triumphs in labour history – new unionism, the dock strike and the Poplar rates campaign – were becoming victims of a resurgent free-market capitalism over which they had no control.

In many ways, such critics used Canary Wharf as a cipher for the ideological battles they were fighting over the evolution of national political-economic theory and practice, and it remains relatively easy to read Canary Wharf as emblematic of wider changes in society. Canary Wharf is a physical testament to the growing importance of finance and associated sectors in generating economic wealth in a global economy; to the growing numbers of professional and middle-class people who have moved to live in inner city locations; to the significance of multinational immigration at both ends of the labour market; and to the growing power of private investment and interests in shaping urban regeneration and infrastructure (Sassen, 1999; Hamnett, 2003; Wills et al, 2010).

However, as a group of academics working very close to Canary Wharf, we wanted to revisit this dominant view of the Wharf and its conflict. Funded by Queen Mary’s Centre for Public Engagement, we designed a small research project to try to get a better insight into the

5 evolution of corporate-community relations over the past 20 years. To this end we have analysed corporate reports, conducted an online survey and undertaken 12 face-to-face interviews (see Appendix 1). This report documents the main findings of our research.

In summary, our research has highlighted the extent to which corporate social responsibility (CSR) is taken extremely seriously by companies, community groups and other service providers and has become embedded in the life-blood of both companies and community groups in east London. Many corporations have developed strong relationships with local community organisations including schools and charities through a wide range of activities (see Figure 1). Over time, the individuals involved in these relationships have focused on identifying and serving their mutual interests: the companies have come to integrate community-based activities into their core business agenda, and so too, rather than being supplicant, community organisations have been able to access resources that help serve their goals and priorities.

Figure 1: CSR activities in east London by companies based in Canary Wharf

Source: Authors’ compilation of data provided by companies, brokers, official records and the Charity Commission

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In addition, although a number of important new mediating institutions came into existence in the early days of the development in order to broker what were sometimes difficult relationships between the corporations and the community, over time, relationships have also developed independently and have multiplied (see Figure 2). The development of CSR has strengths and weaknesses for both parties and in what follows we document these developments before going on to explore their wider implications for the future development of east London.

Figure 2: CSR activities in east London by two key mediating organisations

Source: Authors’ compilation of data provided by companies, brokers, official records and the Charity Commission

The Key Players: corporations, communities and mediating institutions Corporations From its inception, Canary Wharf has been an unusual development. The national Government played a key role in establishing the London Docklands Development Corporation that managed the regeneration of the wider area, and the company Olympia

7 and York was allowed to buy the Canary Wharf site for development in the mid-1980s. The company subsequently went bust and has been refinanced twice – highlighting the extent to which the early stages of the development were never as secure as they might now appear – but in its current manifestation as the Canary Wharf Group, this company still drives the development. It remains a combination of land-owner, landlord, developer, employer and mediator between the corporations and local community groups. As a long-serving representative from the company explained during interview: We have a very deep relationship with the site here in that we own the freehold of the whole place, all the buildings, all the land, all the roads. It’s a private estate so we own all the roads and the parks and the shopping centre and the traffic lights, the security, the trees, refuse collection, street cleaning, street maintenance, this is all us. And, we’re half-finished in terms of the development of Canary Wharf. So Canary Wharf will be twice as big when we’re finished, so we’re half way through the development [we’re] 25 years in, which means we’ve got another 25 years to go.

Somewhat unusually, the nature of their early role meant that this company always acted as part-developer and part-agent of regeneration. Whereas these roles are usually divided, the Canary Wharf development was necessarily planned as a social project. As their representative explained: We’re a property developer … we’re making money … we’re building shiny towers, but this is still a regeneration project; we’re still turning space that twenty-five years ago nobody wanted and actually had a negative value, into something very, very different. And, although we as a private company have never formally had a regeneration remit, as in, nobody said, you know, ‘make money, and by the way, here is a list of public policy objectives that you’ve got to meet’, we have effectively inherited that regeneration remit from the London Docklands Development Corporation, and operated as if we had a regeneration remit.

Although they didn’t have a statutory duty to think about the social impact of their development, the family behind Olympia and York decided to think about more than bricks and mortar right from the start. In part this was due to the need for good local relationships to make the project happen (to secure labour supplies, and prevent vandalism and protests)

8 as well as a genuine interest in the wider success of the project long-term. A mixture of pragmatism and principle came into play such that the pioneer of the site had to think about the way in which it related to the local population. As the company representative recalled during interview: Olympia and York … knew that they had to find local labour, they had to work with the people like the unions on the boats if they were going to use the river for transportation. They had to do deals with people, locally, to get … the trucks in and out; they didn’t want to have barricades up stopping construction from happening. Olympia and York also knew that once the buildings were completed, they were going to have to recruit local staff to fill vacancies in retail, security and cleaning and this again focused corporate minds on relationship building. Indeed, the provision of jobs is the greatest local appeal of the site and getting local people into employment is widely recognised as important, even if it is sometimes hard to achieve (see more below).

While Canary Wharf is now home to a plethora of multinational companies whose CSR remit is global, the commitment of these companies to east London is notable. Indeed, although the largest multinational companies broker their own CSR activities through charitable foundations (e.g. the KPMG Foundation, the Credit Suisse EMEA Foundation, the Clifford Chance Foundation), these have a national and global remit. The offices at Canary Wharf still have independent funds and programmes to work locally and especially in east London where needs are viewed as being most acute and/or there is a greater imperative to act.

Nature of CSR activities in companies: Canary Wharf is home to a large number of well- known multinational corporations. Our survey and interviews highlighted the wide range of activities and geographical locations in which these companies are engaged (see Figure 1). The main CSR activities focus on financial contributions, pro bono services and allocated staff time for volunteering and mentoring, although many more ad hoc smaller scale activities are carried out, often for named charities. Pro bono services predominantly entail provision of legal, marketing and financial assistance while volunteering included mentoring, reading in schools, chairing boards of governors of schools or boards of trustees, on charities, and painting and gardening for various community groups.

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However, the main thrust of the work has been with younger people with a specific focus on education and training and access to employment. These have been key priorities for much corporate activity in the local community over the recent years. Many company representatives recognised that local people may not have either the desire or the means to access employment at Canary Wharf and, as a result, much CSR activity has been designed to shift aspirations and improve standards in schools. Many companies welcomed children and young people in to their buildings as well as sending volunteers out to support reading and mentoring work in schools. One CSR executive told us that: “You can’t work here in this kind of environment without wanting to encourage local youngsters … to see this as a place where they too can work.” While this particular company had three headings for their activities - “access to justice, access to finance, and access to education” - it was the last that facilitated most of their contact with the local community.

In this regard, one bank had a particularly holistic approach to their work to help disadvantaged young people get into employment. They had three different streams of activity: “One is enterprise skills. One is money skills – financial literacy because we are a bank. The other is life skills and that is mainly around employability skills.” While this strategy had been developed across the company as a whole, CSR executives were in the process of focusing their activities in particular geographical areas (called Deep Local Impact Areas), including east London. The delivery of these activities was through relationships with locally-based charities, schools and organisations. As an example, the company had funded a local project that provided mentors to support the most vulnerable children as they went through secondary school. In a similar vein, another company had sponsored an Academy in Hackney and provided considerable on-going support via the governing board of the school as well as running extensive volunteering activities for reading and mentoring work.

As indicated above, although we found that education was the prime focus for much CSR activity in east London, it was not exclusively so. We also came across examples of less typical practice. One large legal firm had started work with older people in the area telling us: We’ve engaged with Age UK London and Jewish Care … [and that] connection came through one of our Jewish partners for whom we host an annual party … their

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Shavuot annual party … We’ve hosted quarterly tea parties … so we get old people into the office for an afternoon of tea parties and people can come and chat to these people who live very isolated lives. This organisation was also working with the charities Crisis and Peabody to provide volunteers to assist with CV preparation, mentoring and mock interviewing experiences for homeless people looking for work. The respondent had been in her post for a long time and described the work as an ‘organic development’ as she met her company goals while also building relationships with various local organisations. When they started working with a new group, they experimented to see what worked and then decided how to take things forward. While they had been working with one primary school in Tower Hamlets for 18 years, providing volunteers for reading support, and they had other longer term relationships with a number of the CSR brokers, new relationships were being developed all the time, often at the instigation of staff.

While this company told us that they always tried to respond to potential demand, a successful project also depended upon a community’s capacity to “manage the programme … [and] provide the right throughput of volunteers so that we don’t disengage our own people.” Although the provision of volunteers tended to mean that the activities had to be reasonably local to the Canary Wharf office, the company also had long standing commitments to provide pro bono legal services for a wide variety of organisations, some local, others national and international. Locally, these included Community Links and Magic Me, but at a larger scale, they were also supporting organisations such as the National Autistic Society, Asylum Watch, the Howard League for Penal Reform and Save the Children UK. This organisation also match-funded any money raised for charities by their own members of staff.

Embedding CSR over time: In relation to trends in the sector, our research highlighted the extent to which the forms of CSR practised by the companies at Canary Wharf had shifted over the past 20 years. One respondent told us that not only was it a ‘good thing’ but also the ‘right thing’, reflecting a moral imperative behind their activities: “number one it’s the right thing to do and I enjoy it ... We’re a huge employer so we should be looking to help the people locally to get jobs ... and we have a responsibility there I think.” However, others

11 made a stronger business case for CSR. Reflecting wider changes in the field, one respondent explained how CSR had moved from being “a good thing to do … [to] a business essential.” This was further echoed by another respondent who reported that although the company had always prioritised the need to benefit the community, their new leadership wanted to increase this ethos, saying: They want us to be doing responsible capitalism. It’s a really broad approach they want us to take, not just doing community investment. They want every partner in the business to be thinking about how they can contribute to sustainability through the work they do. There is a really strong drive for us to be a responsible business and I think that motivates everybody. As such, CSR was seen to complement rather than conflict with corporate interests, and indeed, it was seen as contributing to business success.

In this regard, corporate respondents told us that their community-based activities were good for: (1) recruitment of the best graduates; (2) opportunities for employee development; (3) the potential diversification of staff; (4) fostering ‘responsible’ corporate culture; (5) improving client relations and; (6) the position and brand of the business. In this latter regard, one company suggested to us that winning business increasingly depended upon demonstrating “what you do for the community [and] … sustainability.” While this firm was trying to win cleaning contracts, they were mindful that their CSR activities had a profound impact on the way their brand was perceived, the relationships they made with potential clients and their ability to sustain business relationships. The firm had newly hired a CSR director and rather than being regarded as an add-on, their work with apprentices, charities and volunteering was increasingly central to the business itself. As the interviewee explained: “You’ve got to do it to win business, you’ve got to do it to build relationships with the client, and it’s the right thing to do.”

Respondents also highlighted the way in which their CSR activities were now more targeted on particular areas with measurable outcomes that could help them to evaluate their impact. One corporate respondent told us that they were supporting “fewer, bigger and tighter programmes.” Such partnerships were then linked to Key Performance Indicators that could be measured to evaluate the social return on the money invested. As another

12 respondent explained in relation to their investment in a school in Hackney: “We did some baseline work, we checked out what the landscape is like today so that in ten years … we will be able to measure against [that data]. It’s really important that all of our work is measurable, that we’ve defined outcomes so we can track whether what we’re doing is working.” The measurement of outcomes also included the impact on staff, exploring the extent to which volunteering helped to develop particular skills.

A number of respondents were keenly aware that their CSR activities allowed their staff to get out of the office in order to learn and practice new skills, as well as providing the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with people who were different to them. A number commented on the diversity of the population in east London, and the chance they had to connect with very diverse groups of residents. Similarly, one of our community-based respondents noted that the CSR activities allowed professional workers from Canary Wharf and the City to “show a different side of themselves.” He went on to report that people got a sense of personal satisfaction from working with pupils in his school; they could make a contribution to the wider social good as part of their job.

The community view Local community hostility to the early development of Canary Wharf was not widely discussed in relation to community relations in general or CSR in particular. Somewhat ironically, the clearest expression and justification for the conflict came from the representative of the Canary Wharf Group who told us that in those early days: There was a huge argument. A huge opposition to the whole idea of Canary Wharf being built here on the docks. The local community wanted the docks to stay open, they never thought the docks should have been closed in the first place, they didn’t like the global forces that led to that happening and they didn’t like the specific, local, what they saw as very poor management of the docks, that led to the docks closing. The announcement, and then start of work on the Canary Wharf project was the final admission that this, that this is never going to be an industrial area again, the docks are never going to reopen, the industry is never going to come back, you know, it was, to the local community it seemed like central government had given up,

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on all the things that they’d been trying to do, and now this was something completely different and they would have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Over time, the company developed relationships with the organised local community and they were strategically savvy in appointing Peter Wade, the Chair of the Association of Island Communities (a key community organisation on the Isle of Dogs where Canary Wharf is located), to work for them as their first Head of Public Affairs. In what was seen by many as a classic case of poacher-turned-gamekeeper, our respondent told us that Peter was “not a representative of the company in the local community … [but] the representative of the local community inside the company.” Wade stayed with the company for 18 years until his retirement, acting as “a useful internal check on how we do business.” While he suffered considerable hostility from some local residents for taking on the role, Wade’s presence was testament to the power of the local community and the extent to which the company had to engage with them in order to be able to work on the Isle of Dogs.

While the organised local community were initially hostile, and powerful enough to win recognition and a serious response from the corporate developers, our research exposed the way that opposition had declined over time. In part, this is due to the way in which people like Peter Wade brokered relationships between the development and the community, and the benefits secured for local community projects. More prosaically, it is also a product of time whereby people have got used to the development that has taken root in their midst. But perhaps most importantly, the community itself has also changed over this time. A new generation of Islanders has come to adulthood during the years that the Wharf has been built. None of them has memories of the docks and associated community life, and many of them have had to move further east to buy their own family- sized homes. Furthermore, middle-class professionals – many of whom work at Canary Wharf – have moved into the small private flats that have been built around the area in a myriad of new developments. To date, this population has been less organised than the more established groups but as numbers and capacity have grown, this new community is also playing a part in the evolution of corporate-community relationships.

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Describing the impact of on-going demographic shifts on corporate-community relationships, the representative from Canary Wharf Group told us that their work had changed considerably “from being a … relatively two-way conversation between a new economic heart for the local area and the people who really wanted the old economic heart back ... [to being] a more complicated sort of multi-faceted relationship with the whole community.” In addition, the research highlighted the way that relationships between companies and community-based organisations had matured over time. As intimated above, many companies were looking to focus their investment in particular areas of activity working with specific organisations, often for the very long term.

We uncovered one very striking example of this in the education sector. During the mid- 2000s, one Tower Hamlets secondary school, faced with closure, had appointed a new Head Teacher in order to turn the school around. As part of his brief, he sought to build an alliance of interested parties to help develop the school. Working with Queen Mary University of London, the Local Authority and the local Education Business Partnership, he made contact with a senior manager at a City-based insurance company and started to develop a strong relationship that remains to this day. The company made a board-level decision to work with the school and has since had staff sitting on the Foundation Trust and the school’s governing body. They also provide facilities for school staff away-days, advise the school on a range of activities including branding and marketing, offer training to school staff (including the team that welcomes people into the school), provide volunteers who come into the school to support reading and enterprise, and contribute financially to the Foundation Trust.

While this school had relationships with a number of other large corporations in Canary Wharf and beyond – to support an enterprise scheme, IT training and help with presentation skills, mentoring for students doing GCSEs and in the sixth form – their prime corporate relationship was with the City-based firm that had been there from the start. This relationship was described as a ‘partnership’ as the school and the corporation were invested in the success of each other. Interestingly, the school respondent highlighted the way in which the partnership had encouraged them to think more carefully about their core values and the way they interacted with the local community. Talking about their

15 experience, this respondent reflected that the relationship had made them “a stronger organisation [as] we feel like an organisation that’s got the benefits of some very committed friends.”

A number of community organisations argued that they needed long term investment to secure their services and to make a more meaningful impact in the communities they serve. As one respondent from a health-focused project told us: “Our fundamental purpose is … empowerment and [that] is often about confidence building. It’s often about the soft side of how you support people. It’s often about long journeys … so we’re not about a three year government programme or indeed, a two year CSR relationship. Our relationships go back generations now … in some … [of the] families that we’ve been working with. That doesn’t lend itself to the kinds of outcomes that people sometimes want to see with their money.” As a result, they had sought to cultivate strong relationships with corporate funders to ensure they understood what they were doing, and appreciated the need for stability and long term funding. If such long term funding relationships were not possible for particular projects, they would work with a potential funder to develop new project ideas in the hope that those would take off. This organisation reported that in the year of interview only 5% of their funding was coming from the Local Authority (a dramatic decline from rates in the past) and an increasing amount of their financial support was coming from corporate sources.

The community organisations and educational representatives we spoke to certainly felt it was worthwhile for them to engage with companies not only in financial terms in relation to securing grants for projects, but also in terms of changing the perceptions and aspirations of people living in east London. As one respondent from a primary school in Tower Hamlets noted in relation to their ‘learning partner’ volunteers from a large bank: “it’s worthwhile and the children get a lot from that half an hour of one-to-one with someone who is not a teacher or a family member. It’s about aspirations, about children knowing that it will be possible to move ahead. And about the children not being intimidated by the people in suits who they see getting off the tubes every day.” However, as we outline below, this engagement is also not without its risks. While some community groups are better able to negotiate what they want from corporate relationships than they were in the past, this is

16 still not straight-forward. As one health-related organisation noted: “We’re … slightly less caught in the headlights with corporates than perhaps we were once,” further reporting that the community organization takes a much harder line with them in terms of agreeing and fulfilling the terms of engagement.

Mediating institutions Brokering organisations such as the East London Business Association (ELBA), the newly merged and renamed East End Community Foundation (formed from the Isle of Dogs Community Foundation and the St Katherine and Shadwell Trust), Newham and Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnerships and City Link, to name a few, have grown up in London over the past two decades and grapple with similar issues to the companies and the community over CSR activities. While each corporation we covered had their own projects and relationships with the local community, a number of brokering organisations also acted as intermediaries to foster and manage corporate-community relations. As one respondent from a brokering agency reported: “We are sort of professional enough to work with the businesses and we are approachable enough, you know, for the voluntary sector to want to come to us to ask questions and advice. So that is what works with us and that is ... the sort of glue that keeps it together in that sense”. Such intermediation allows both corporate and community organisations to mitigate their risks and to effectively inform and translate the issues from both sides. For example, for one of the brokerages, it was clear that community engagement “drives value for their [corporate] business” and it was their job to convince them of this value on the ground.

Another key role of the brokering organisations was in highlighting the needs of the community in the first place. This can be especially important for raising awareness of the nature of deprivation in east London. One of these brokers recalled how they organise “seeing is believing” tours for trustees and potential corporates to various projects to highlight the impact they can have. They also stop at a local housing estate in Poplar for what they call “the shock value”; “we let them have a good look and then explain, you know, how many people live on the estate, how many people are unemployed. I think it’s just a real eye-opener for people because they commute in and out of Canary Wharf ... To take them

17 out of the beauty of Canary Wharf to the reality of Tower Hamlets has been really effective for us”.

Once relationships with corporates were more developed, the brokers would then help in placing volunteers. One broker told us that they placed 14,500 corporate volunteers from up to 100 member companies in the previous year, supporting a wide variety of schools and community organisations in east London (and the geographical reach of this work is illustrated in Figure 2). In addition, brokers helped to ensure that local people could access jobs in certain sectors such as cleaning, securing preferential access to the recruitment process. For example, one respondent noted: Recruitment’s always difficult ... the benefits of utilising [a broker] are they help us with the recruitment process, so there’s a big saving for us because it saves my manager’s time in recruiting if these guys will help us get the application forms done, or whatever we need to do. Also [it’s] about aligning our goals with the client’s as well.

We found that the evolution and maturing of these types of organisations and their alliances has meant that brokers are increasingly delivering their own projects alongside their various matching services, volunteering placements and grant-making. This reflects the shift among the companies noted above towards developing their own relationships in the community, rendering the liaison services redundant. One broker organisation noted that they had begun to deliver projects directly several years earlier as a strategic decision to keep afloat: It was definitely the right thing for us to do ... it has definitely kept a lot of the corporates on board who would now be saying ‘well we don’t give money. We are not looking to give money for grant-making’. Certainly, the comments that are coming through now [are] ... ‘How can we work with you because we are about to change our criteria and we are not really funding third parties or brokers. What can we do with you?’ Oh, so fund one of our employability projects then.

Despite some changes, the brokers continue to play an important role in facilitating the links between corporations and communities in east London. This is especially the case among smaller organisations. One representative from a well-established group told us: “the

18 principal area where they bring real value is … for smaller charities …[that’s] where that brokerage service is really, is really important”. Indeed, some community organisations discussed how new brokers were also being established but not without problems. Mainly as a result of the diversity of the existing partnerships, new brokers often found that their approaches were not appropriate. One primary school respondent recalled how a new broker had come to them to try to develop a relationship with a bank with whom they had been working for several years: “They had jumped on the band wagon without knowing anything about the community and the relationships already established. I said, I’ve already got a relationship with them thank you.”

As well as the emergence of different brokers to mediate the corporate-community relations, other networks have emerged to support CSR professionals in terms of promoting best practice, setting standards and disseminating information. These include the City Networking Group, Heart of the City and the London Benchmarking Group. Such networks are important in promoting inter-company engagement and sharing best practice in CSR.

CSR in east London: (historical) geography matters All of our corporate respondents were acutely aware of the responsibility that accompanied their geographical position in London’s east end. The juxtaposition of rich and poor was particularly stark, reinforcing a moral duty to act. As the respondent from Canary Wharf Group put it: “Charity begins at home [and] your first responsibility is to the people who are looking up at your big building.” As this respondent continued, people needed a moral licence to move to the area saying: to have a licence to operate, a moral licence to operate, in a place like this, to put, you know, people earning, being paid (whether they earn it or not is another question), but being paid a million pounds plus a year, in a great big shiny American- style office building, in what is statistically one of the poorest boroughs in the United Kingdom, and within close walking distance of some of the poorest, you know, I think, four of the top ten poorest wards in the UK are in Tower Hamlets … you have to operate in a certain way.

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In addition, although it is rarely acknowledged, there is a sense in which Canary Wharf has had to compete with the City which already had deeply established community-based partners and outreach activities. One community-based respondent who had a close relationship with one of the City Guilds commented on the extent to which “Canary Wharf measure[s] itself against the City” and that meant having some of the ethos of philanthropy developed and practised by the companies and organisations in the City.

As such, many of our respondents recognised the particular benefits to communities of being based in east London. One corporate interviewee described Tower Hamlets as being unique because: It’s got so much business support and … everybody here wants to get engaged. There is not a school in Tower Hamlets that hasn’t got business support, which is unique, and I think that has contributed, it must have contributed to the outstanding results that the primary schools get, and increasingly, the secondary schools [too] … Further east is a different kettle of fish altogether … I think Newham is at a disadvantage as far as east London is concerned because it doesn’t have as many businesses based in its locality, and people think of it still as being miles away where it’s [actually] so close via the Jubilee Line.

The special geographical position of Tower Hamlets was most obviously recognised in relation to volunteering, as one corporate respondent told us: “if they are close we can get people to them in the lunch hour. We are starting to bring in youngsters into the bank, that is good to them as well to see what it’s like but there is a time factor.” Likewise another community-based respondent told us: “one of the big attractions of us … is that we’re local [and] we’re very visual … it’s not a draughty church hall. This is a nice place to come.” But such opportunities also had to be realised by the community. One respondent highlighted the extent to which community leaders had to be open to making relationships and sustaining activities with their corporate neighbours. Without goodwill, the benefits of geography could not be realised. Seizing opportunities was clearly important as one school- based respondent explained: “I sort of chortle about the fact that we’re in a wonderful triangle. We’ve got the Olympic Park, we’ve got Canary Wharf and we’ve got the City, and we’re right in the middle! … This is where London is happening and we’re there. You can

20 either … passively watch it or engage with it, be excited by it.” With this attitude, the school was benefiting from a host of relationships and activities that were enhancing its success. A number of respondents recognised that they needed to tread carefully in developing relationships with corporations and they sought to avoid dealing with controversial companies (for example, those involved in arms or tobacco) and to avoid those that are not involved for mutual and long term benefit, but they were also open to the opportunities posed by their geographical proximity to major corporations.

However, the immediacy of opportunities for corporate philanthropy close to the Canary Wharf development is not the only explanation for the extensive evidence of community engagement revealed by this study. The east end of London has long been recognised as a site of poverty and inequality as well as an area ripe for philanthropic intervention and regeneration, stretching back to the nineteenth century and before. While respondents typically articulated the emergence of current community needs as linked to the decline of the docks and subsequent regeneration processes that marginalised local people, the idea of the east end as a place of longstanding social and economic problems clearly informed contemporary philanthropic engagements. As the Canary Wharf Group respondent put it: This part of London has always been poor. It was poor … before the docks came, you know, it was outside the walls of the city, so it was where the poor people lived who serviced the city in the Sixteenth Century and Seventeenth Century. When the docks came at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the docks brought their own intensification of housing, but, you know, it was a very, very poor area. You know, Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper. You know, Limehouse, was the sort of opium dens, the original Chinatown. This … has always been a poor area, and when Canary Wharf came, it was poor in a different way. Instead of being incredibly dense and incredibly highly populated but very, very economically active, when Canary Wharf came along, actually, it was probably at its economically least active point.

Although seemingly unaware of the history of extensive philanthropic engagement within east London in the Victorian period – albeit driven largely efforts individual visionaries like Thomas Barnardo or Angela Burdett Coutts rather than by companies – the concerns of current CSR professionals echo these historical antecedents, especially in their focus on

21 young people’s education and training, and the health of local populations. Several of our interviewees pointed to the history of immigration to the east end as important to understanding its contemporary distinctiveness as a diverse and dynamic community. As one of the respondents from a brokering organisation put it, “once again the community of Tower Hamlets is changing, like it has done for the last 400 years … I think people really engage with that and they can kind of see it.” Because of its demographic complexion, working in east London offers corporations opportunities for progressive engagement with diversity. As the same interviewee remarked, “I think it’s about the complex need and the complexity of communities” enabling CSR schemes not only to tackle issues of poverty, but also of discrimination and exclusion. So while the focus of corporate philanthropy and community engagement in east London can partly be explained by its proximity to Canary Wharf and the City, it is also clear that the area’s distinctiveness as a particular kind of place – as a part of London where it is well known that people have struggled for decades against longstanding poverty and environmental problems, as a site of social and ethnic diversity, and as a locality where there is a tradition of state, civil society and private interest all pursuing creative and radical agendas aimed at improving the lives of those who live there – draws contemporary CSR programmes to the east end.

For their part, the corporates were realistic about their ability to end poverty in east London, even though it was their proximity to poverty that drove them to act. Many dismissed the power of ‘trickle-down’ to make a significant difference to life in east London but they did argue about the importance of influencing particular people at specific stages of life – and this was especially true in relation to their work in schools. One corporate respondent recognised the persistent ‘gap’ between local people and the Canary Wharf complex, describing her experiences with young people in schools right next to the Wharf. She argued that: there’s a complete disengagement between the local kids and the local communities and this place [Canary Wharf] … It’s fantastic to work here. It’s fabulous because it’s completely geared to work, but the shops are all really expensive … This is very much a little island and I think you can’t operate in this kind of business place without being seen publicly to be doing something to help people connect with it.

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Historically, the pattern has been that longer term residents have gradually seen their fortunes – or the fortunes of their children – improve and they have then moved further east, out of the area, leaving space for a new group of incomers. Changes in the regulation of social housing and the provision of expensive private housing might alter these dynamics in the future. As a respondent from one of the brokers explained: “Regeneration doesn’t stop, it evolves.”

Sustainable partnerships between corporations and communities Although the research found that communities located near to Canary Wharf and the City are clearly benefiting by developing strategic connections with their powerful neighbours, it also raises a number of questions about sustainability. Although the health-oriented organisation stated that their partnerships with corporates often allowed them to “drive innovation” through experimentation which often led to long-term change, this situation appears to be shifting. Indeed, as noted above, representatives of several community organisations and schools reported that a move towards more targeted assistance, focused on particular areas, could have negative effects on their activities. A clear example was provided by the primary school respondent who had a partnership with an investment bank over seven years which allowed her school to access £25,000 per year for a range of activities linked with expanding educational opportunities. However, the shift towards getting young people back to work meant that they lost this funding in 2012. Although the bank continues to run a volunteering programme in the school, the annual grant has been stopped.

The increasing shift towards measuring the outcomes of partnerships was also identified as a challenge for some organisations and schools, and was linked with the narrowing of targets and priorities. In a hypothetical discussion about whether a bank would support a teenage pregnancy project in Tower Hamlets or vaccinate 5,000 children in Africa, the respondent noted: “There’s no contest really, [they] … are definitely going to save lives. And again, it makes them feel good ... it’s about them wanting to know what they’re going to get. It’s not just about branding, they want to say ‘We saved 5,000 lives’”. Funding the teenage pregnancy project was further hindered by the sensitive subject matter. One

23 broker’s representative recalled that when she spoke to a bank about funding this project they were very reluctant: ‘Oh, teenage pregnancy, no don’t ask us anything about smoking either or drugs.’ There is a street work programme on the Island and it’s really good and it’s engaging with young people about HIV and AIDS and drug awareness. They were like ‘Oh no’ ... they don’t want their company associated with that. I know they have given smaller donations, but definitely don’t want any publicity associated with it.

Sustainability is also affected by the role of specific individuals within companies who champion particular causes and projects. If these individuals move on, then any particular stream of funding could be put in jeopardy. Sustained engagement can also be undermined by the failure of a particular project after which funds cease to flow. The primary school respondent discussed a ‘failed’ project with a financial institution where they worked on providing IT in the classroom. Despite trying to get the project up and running for three years, they eventually gave up after the demands from the institution in relation to the need for specific lesson plans, use of Powerpoint and so on, became too onerous for her teaching staff.

Into the future, the controversy over the potential mismatch between meeting local needs with demands from corporates in a sustainable way remains an issue. This was exemplified by the health-related community organisation whose representative discussed how companies are not always able or willing to address the most pressing issues affecting east London, especially in relation to immigration: “You know, we’ve got a lot of new immigrants arriving and new arrivals … There’s a whole generation of women actually, 40 plus women ... Are we going to write them off for the rest of their lives and say they’re never going to engage with British culture? Well no, but actually there’s no money to fund this stuff.” Interestingly, however, this respondent noted that the trusts and foundations had recognised these needs, but that the corporates were much less keen to engage with this or what he referred to as “the world that’s now emerging around real poverty, real deprivation”.

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Economic downturn and partnerships Another potential threat to the sustainability of corporate-community partnerships and CSR funding has been the recent financial crisis and economic downturn. Interestingly, although there was some evidence of a reduction in volunteering numbers because of wider workforce redundancies, respondents from both corporations and communities were remarkably upbeat. Interrogated about the impact of the economic downturn on activity, for example, one corporate respondent told us: “If anything, we have increased our activities since we realised the growing pressures and needs of our local partners. Having worked hard to build relationships, we want to ensure our partners survive and succeed.” The company valued their relationships and, while they reviewed their CSR activities on a regular basis, they planned to sustain this work for the long term.

Perceived increased needs following the economic downturn were identified most commonly as youth unemployment and legal aid. In relation to the latter, one respondent from a law firm told us that they were expanding their pro bono work (they already had a target for each lawyer to do 50 hours pro bono work per annum) as well as increasing funding to law centres: “I was advised of a law centre that we know, just this morning, [that] their subsidy from the government has been cut from £1.3 million to £800,000 and yet their increased need is going to double in the next year.”

One area where there had been a change as a result of the crisis related to how the financial institutions in particular chose to communicate their community engagement activities in relation to branding. Several community respondents reported that banks in particular had taken their branding off activities. As one stated: “before the crash, the market crash, branding was definitely a big thing that they wanted to be recognised for everything they do. Since the crash, not so much ... I think they’re just trying to be out of the limelight.”

Linked with addressing increasing need, as intimated above, many of the community respondents also highlighted a move towards longer term, more embedded, partnership working in recent years, and this approach should help to sustain community-facing services into the future. Certainly, one of the school-based respondents told us that they had a “deep partnership that can take the good times and the bad times and we’ll work through

25 it.” Similarly, another respondent from a community-based health project highlighted the way that their relationships with companies had become much more long term. He told us they were: “trying to create meaningful partnerships … [where] there’s more money involved, more corporate volunteering involved, [and] they tend to be looking not just for flash-in-the-pan, quick one year impact, [but] much more into doing stuff for the long term.” This gave the community organisations greater security about the work than they might have had in the past. Moreover, they had much lighter touch reporting requirements than was usual with public sector funding, making the cost of running the services much less expensive. As the same respondent explained, “corporate relationships usually require a fair bit of management, but what they don’t require is intrusive monitoring and reporting.”

However, the research also found that there were no certainties, and in an economy based on relationships, a change in personnel or priorities could put any particular stream of funding in jeopardy. Community respondents certainly reported that they could identify growing need in their community, and as austerity began to bite, this would only increase. The hope is that communities have the long-term relationships with companies that can bridge the shortfall in state funding and meet increasing demand. As one of the broker- respondents suggested: “I think there is a general consensus that people should take responsibility for the local communities in which they are a part, whether it is by virtue of working or living there.” If so, the reliance on corporate funding is only likely to grow, and this can only succeed by working in tandem with local community organisations and people.

Conclusion In the early years of the regeneration of the Isle of Dogs, the first Chair of the London Docklands Development Corporation, Sir Nigel Broackes, famously remarked that ‘we are not a welfare association but a property-based organisation offering good value’. His intervention in 1982 angered many in the local community who were opposed to the ‘free market’ approach to regeneration that was being followed by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Thirty years later, his vision of property-led regeneration as about generating commercial profit rather than meeting the needs of local people seems at odds with the substantial evidence of wide ranging and deeply embedded corporate philanthropy initiatives that we have found in this study. The history of the Canary Wharf development

26 suggests that over time strong relationships can be built between corporations and local community organisations, reducing the friction between welfare and profit, and shaping the development of people and place. Particularly in the area of the education, training and the mentoring of young people, corporations are deeply engaged in the well-being of communities and localities in east London. Many of these relationships are mature and both parties are firmly committed to working together into the future, seeking a positive impact on the lives of those they are trying to support. Indeed, we would argue that ‘corporate welfare’ has become a significant additional strand of the increasingly complex assemblage of private corporations, state institutions, voluntary bodies, community organisations and individuals whose interventions and support underpin livelihoods in east London.

However, while not diminishing the positive impacts that corporate philanthropy and community engagement have brought to east London, the risks associated with the growing penetration and increasing reliance upon multinational corporations as a provider of welfare and support are manifold. Here we have highlighted the issues of sustainability, the selectivity of corporate initiatives and the wider uncertainty caused by the shifting economic climate and austerity. However, two broader questions emerge as a consequence of this study. The first concerns the way that the state – especially local government, which seemed marginal to the many initiatives and activities discussed by our respondents – should engage with and seek to co-ordinate its own work with that of CSR programmes. The findings of this study of east London suggest that there has already been a fundamental shift in the way that private companies interact with local public institutions and service providers. Where does this leave the state and how might it reconfigure its role to make room for greater corporate community engagement? However, the second question that emerges from this study relates to the particularity of east London and the extent to which this reconfiguration is being experienced elsewhere. While it might be tempting to argue that ‘corporate welfare’ is set to transform the provision of education and welfare services in the contemporary United Kingdom, this ignores the unique level of engagement that is evident in the specific part of east London that has been the principal focus of this study. As many of our interviewees acknowledged - and as Figures 1 and 2 reveal - the spatial scope of corporate beneficence in east London is relatively localised, centring on the borough of Tower Hamlets and the ‘inner’ or ‘old’ east end. Beyond the River Lea and further afield in

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Greater London evidence of engagement appears to be patchier. While further research is needed to understand the full extent of corporate community engagement, in areas of the UK where there is not a concentration of multi-national corporations with large CSR budgets and committed personnel, the prospect of private enterprise supporting the needs of local people seems limited. Nevertheless, this study has cast light on an important metropolitan trend where, as a consequence of London’s globally-oriented, multi-national corporation- led financial service economy, the city’s communities and its local welfare regimes are being reshaped in very significant ways.

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Appendix

Methodological framework

We conducted 10 interviews between October 2012 and April 2013 under conditions of anonymity. Two of these encounters involved two respondents, meaning that we spoke to 12 individuals (7 from not-for-profit brokers and community-based organisations; and 5 professionals working in CSR at Canary Wharf).

An online survey was also conducted with CSR representatives from companies in Canary Wharf and this generated additional data that has helped to inform our analysis.

The maps (Figures 1 and 2) were aggregated from information provided by the companies themselves, records found in corporate Annual and Directors’ reports internet sites, the Charity Commission and data collated by the brokerage organisations.

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Hamnett, C. (2003). Unequal City: London in the Global Arena. London: Routledge.

Merrifield, A. (1993). The Canary Wharf debacle: from’TINA'-there is no alternative- to'THEMBA'-there must be an alternative. Environment and Planning A, 25(1992), 1247–1265. Retrieved from http://envplan.com/epa/fulltext/a25/a251247.pdf

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