CSR Get Ready for Work

“The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away”

Background

Martin Haigh has been raising funds and supporting various groups since his first Marathon in 1981. Whizz-Kidz, Outward Bound Trust, Cancer Research, British Heart Foundation, Children with Leukaemia, Special Schools, Baby Units, and Scope etc benefitted.

Corporate Social Responsibility focus

Then, when he founded Lattitude7 in 2010, Martin had a vision to continue promoting opportunities by improving social mobility in the local community and beyond. Lattitude7 launched a deliberate CSR policy in which 30% of business efforts would be provided in-kind and be directly focused on helping disadvantaged individuals and groups.

The aim being to create sustainable workforces through complementary programmes (primary school enterprise, High school work-readiness, apprentice charity governance, employability programmes for 18-24 year olds and people with different abilities). These initiatives tightly dovetail with the core business, of developing people and organisations through a continuum of personal development, team development and business process improvement.

Get Ready for Work

In 2011 for example, 9,000 people in Calderdale, were unemployed. 2,000 of them aged 18-24. There existed a substantial human and social cost to youth unemployment which could no longer be ignored.

We therefore built our CSR offering on the following key areas:

• the effects of unemployment on young people’s well-being
• the effects on young people’s motivation to work, and
• the barriers to work, education and training

We call our programme ‘Get Ready for Work’ and this pro-bono element has been geared to achieving significant change in the lives of others, especially their acquisition of skills, attitude, confidence and resilience, to have a better chance of finding and staying in work or self-employment.

What our programmes provide to our target group

Our coverage is wide, yet the needs of the different groups are similar. Our programme provides clients with, not only the technical skills of employability (CV writing etc), but more importantly, highly valued and much undersold ‘soft skills’.

To reinforce this programme, we published: Get Ready for Work – An interactive career planning guide to feel positive about moving on to a secure career path. Content is cross-referenced to Gatsby Benchmarks.