For this month’s CSR profile, we caught up with Hind Nciri, Senior Sustainability Manager, Europe for Standard Chartered Bank, to hear about her journey into the organisation and her role, and to find out why CSR is important to Standard Chartered.

Please provide a short outline of your current role and a brief description of any other relevant career experience
I am a Senior Sustainability Manager at Standard Chartered responsible for delivering our global community engagement strategy across Europe. It is genuinely a dream job but it could have been so different.

I joined the Bank after studying Arabic and Politics at university – I grew up in Hackney, the daughter of first-generation immigrants, and lived in a council flat for most of my childhood. As a teenager, I thought I had a responsibility to work for a global charity or NGO and make the world better for people who were worse off than I was. The idea of working for a Bank seemed unimaginable and unattainable, particularly as back then we didn’t have dedicated programmes to connect us to the corporate world.

The reality is that many children from low income communities do not aspire to what they can’t see and even when they do see it, it often seems beyond reach. Even though I graduated from university with a degree in Arabic and Politics, had studied media and journalism and was an avid volunteer, the lack of experience and/or connections meant that I just wasn’t getting interviews. My lowest point was when only three months after graduating I had to go on unemployment benefits to help my mum pay off a loan she’d taken out to fix our boiler.

Then by chance, a HR volunteer at Standard Chartered sat with me in the canteen to help me with my CV. She saw my potential but also gave me valuable tips to bring the most important elements of my CV to people’s attention. She corrected simple mistakes and stressed the importance of a targeted cover letter and researching the organisation – In my early 20s, this was the first time anyone had shown me what now seems like common sense. It didn’t take much research to see all the ways that the Bank had been supporting its communities and the impact it was making globally and I found myself surprisingly wanting to be a part of that journey.

Though this was a goodwill gesture on her behalf, after sending her an updated version, she added my CV to a pile for a job at the Bank and a little over a month later she called to say that someone transferring in from Hong Kong wanted to interview me for an admin role. It was working with our Investor Relations team, but I was told it was in the department delivering the work I was so passionate about and that this was an organisation that liked to promote from within.

She was right. Within 9 months, I’d had three internal job offers and a very supportive manager who helped me to take the role of my dreams, delivering local community projects in the UK.

I feel so thankful for that conversation in the canteen but am also very aware that without it my situation would have been very different. 15 years later, I now get to create those opportunities for hundreds of people each year through our community, fundraising and volunteering programmes.

Why is CSR important to your organisation?
Over 200 million young people globally are either unemployed, or, if they are employed, they continue to live in poverty due to low income. Social and economic inequality limits individual and collective potential and significantly affects disadvantaged young people who often can’t access the skills and opportunities needed to close the income gap.

Standard Chartered has a long history of contributing to social and economic development and supporting communities across our footprint. Creating inclusive communities is one of three pillars of our sustainability strategy and last year, we launched Futuremakers by Standard Chartered, a global initiative to tackle the issue of inequality and empower our next generation to learn, earn and grow. Our aim is to contribute USD50million to Futuremakers through fundraising and Groupmatching, by 2023 for this purpose.

Which topics, themes or initiatives are your organisation currently focused on?
Futuremakers supports disadvantaged young people from low-income households, particularly girls and people with visual impairments, to take part in programmes focused on education, employability and entrepreneurship.

There are a number of areas where we do this. One way is through Goal, our flagship education programme under Futuremakers. Goal uses sport, play and life skills education to transform the lives of adolescent girls around the world. In 2019, we were proud to launch Goal in six schools across the UK. We work alongside our UK delivery partner, Street League, to empower girls from underserved communities in London and Liverpool to become leaders in their families, schools and communities. Through weekly sessions girls aged 14-15 work their way through the Goal curriculum to develop key life and employability skills designed to enable them to reach their full potential. We supplement the Goal programme with employability workshops, insight visits and volunteering to ensure that the girls are fully supported throughout the programme.

Another area where we use our skills and expertise to support communities is by delivering financial education programmes. For the past four years, we have partnered with Liverpool Football Club Foundation to deliver financial education workshops to primary school pupils in the Anfield community in Liverpool. Four times a year, volunteers from our London head office travel to Liverpool and through their expertise, foster greater financial understanding among the children so they can then make responsible financial choices later in life.

We’re also proud to have partnered with a Marion Richardson School in Stepney for almost 20 years on Reading Partners, a scheme where volunteers read with young children each week to help support literacy and build confidence. There are many other volunteering activities that employees are involved in but this one is a particular favourite of mine as it was the first one I signed up to when I joined the Bank over 15 years ago.

What is the best part of your job?
I am very lucky to get paid to do something I love. My job is varied and can range from governance or managing our fundraising and volunteering activities to designing and delivering large scale employability events for hundreds of young people. I meet lots of interesting people and get to work with some inspiring partners and collaborate on incredible projects to help drive impact in our communities. However, my favourite moments are always when I meet young people on our programmes and hear their stories. Coming from a similar background to many of our beneficiaries, it is very rewarding to provide interventions that I wish I had when growing up. In those moments I see the value of what we do through the their eyes and am thankful that I can be part of their journey.