Please provide a short outline of the Social Impact Team’s role
We’re a team of 11 people based in Linklaters’ London office, with the remit of managing the firm’s global Social Impact programmes. For Linklaters, Social Impact refers to all of our peoples’ volunteering activities, whether that’s the provision of free legal advice (our pro bono work) or the use of our wider professional skills and expertise (our community investment work) to support individuals in need of help and non-profits, social enterprises and charitable organisations.

Last year, our people volunteered over 47,000 hours of their time, applying their skills and expertise to many different social causes and partnering with many dedicated community organisations. In addition to running our London programmes, we support a large network of amazing Social Impact champions, volunteers who co-ordinate local volunteering activity across our network of global Linklaters offices.

We’re also responsible for communicating the impact of our programmes internally and externally, inspiring more people to get involved, so our roles include the opportunity to get creative!

Why is CSR important to your organisation?
Being a responsible business and supporting the people and communities around us through our Social Impact programmes is a key part of our firm’s culture. It’s important for us to share our legal and professional skills to reach and empower those individuals and groups who cannot access advice and help.

As Covid-19 continues to cause extremely difficult circumstances for so many globally, the work of not-for-profits addressing disadvantage and inequality has never been more important. There is a  huge increase in the need for the services of our community partners and yet the crisis is threatening their viability; many are losing funding and practical restrictions have made accessing their services even harder for individuals.

Since the start of the pandemic, teams of volunteers across the firm globally have supported over 50 charities, social enterprises and innovative start-ups with Covid-related issues, whether legal or much wider.  Although so much of our support has been given remotely, it’s been important for our people and our culture to step-up to help where we can and it’s a great example of why CSR and Social Impact are at the heart of the firm’s culture.

Which topics, themes or initiatives are your organisation currently focused on?
Our Social Impact work is about empowering people around the world and helping them to transform their lives. We seek to achieve this by drawing on the particular skills and experience of our people, be that legal advice, research, communications, marketing and PR support, business mentoring, presentation and confidence coaching…we’ve got a real variety of skills!

We don’t focus specifically on a set number of themes, rather focusing on undertaking projects and initiatives where we know we can add the most value and achieve impact. We do this by working in partnership with dedicated community partners, including education and access charities, schools, legal centres, advocacy organisations and innovative social businesses.

Many of our community investment projects support local young people from underrepresented groups, who may otherwise by hard to reach, with access to education and employment skills and opportunities. We aim to empower young people to aim high and to achieve their goals.  In London, we focus specifically on the boroughs of Hackney and Haringey, with the latter still being underserved by large business. Through two holistic partnerships with secondary schools, we deliver six programmes to help students realise their aspirations, ranging from weekly mentoring to mock interviews.

Additional programmes raise employability of adults and scale social enterprise in the area.  Supporting social businesses is important to us, through the School of Social Entrepreneurs we have supported over 200 social entrepreneurs over the last twelve years. Check out this video which showcases two social entrepreneurs we have supported, Joanna and Cemal, highlighting Speak Street who provide free English classes for refugees and migrants and Change Please who train people experiencing homelessness to be baristas.

As an international law firm, channeling our legal skills via pro bono programmes is a key part of our Social Impact strategy. We take on a wide variety of matters, from employment clinics supporting vulnerable migrant workers in Singapore, international research to help the UN Refugee Agency and representing LGBT+ people who are fleeing their country of origin because of their sexual orientation or gender identity and seeking asylum in the UK…the list is broad!

What is the best part of your job?
For me, the most rewarding aspect of a role in the Social Impact team has been hearing from our local office Champions. With Covid-19 creating so many desperate situations for local communities, they’ve been sharing how they’re adapting their “normal” in-person community projects to help. For example, Linklaters volunteers in Madrid are teaching online lessons to school children, in Stockholm Linklaters volunteers have been taking part in in Instagram live sessions sharing their career experiences, interview and CV tips with newly arrived and unaccompanied migrant and refugee young people. Here in London 15 school students have taken part in a virtual work experience programme, completing ‘real work’ tasks online and watching career profile videos made by Linklaters volunteers. Providing these virtual programmes for young people is crucial to ensure opportunities are accessible during Covid-19.

Being able to facilitate emergency donations to our community partners to help them with Covid-19 challenges has also been a highlight for me. In London, this funding has enabled our partner secondary schools to purchase laptops and WIFI dongles to narrow the digital divide for students who don’t have access to technology at home, a huge issue for so many young people right now. EYLA, one of our charity partners, has been able to run a summer school to narrow the attainment gap which is increasing for so many students from lower socio-economic communities.  We hope that the additional funds we have provided many of our community partners globally will help support them through these challenging times.

Volunteering ourselves is also one of the best parts of our role and that’s been no different during lockdown! With ELBA’s help we have hosted great creative lunchtime sessions for the Forget Me Not project, which saw me and other volunteers from London writing and illustrating cards for older people suffering from memory disorders and isolating in East London.

These are just a few examples of many virtual volunteering opportunities that have made us realise what an impact we can all still have volunteering from our homes.