The SE15 Consortium brings improved benefits to the many people and organisations that have a stake in the health and welfare of residents of Peckham and Nunhead.

Motivations for resourcing the work of the VCS within the Corporate Sector are many and varied, and consequently so are the reasons why the Consortium can be important to them.

 Typically, companies who take their Corporate Social Responsibility seriously will do so for one, or a combination of, the following reasons:

•  Human resources - A CSR program can be an aid to recruitment and retention, particularly within the competitive graduate student market. It is not unusual for potential recruits to ask about a firm’s CSR policy, and having a comprehensive policy can give an advantage. CSR can also help improve the perception of a company among its staff, particularly when staff can become involved through payroll giving, fundraising activities or community volunteering; it is also found to encourage better customer focus amongst frontline employees.
•  Risk management – Identifying and reducing risk is a central part of most corporate strategies. Reputations take decades to build up, but can be ruined in hours through incidents such as corruption scandals or environmental accidents, as these draw unwanted attention from regulators, courts, governments and media. Building a genuine culture of ‘doing the right thing’ within a corporation, which customers/clients believe in and value can often substantially offset these risks.
•  Brand identity and differentiation - in crowded marketplaces, companies strive for a unique selling proposition that can help separate them from the competition in the minds of consumers. CSR can play a role in building customer loyalty based on distinctive ethical values; indeed a number of major “brands” such as The John Lewis Partnership, The Co-operative Group, and The Body Shop are built on ethical values. Business service organizations can benefit too from building a reputation for integrity and best practice.
•  License to operate – companies are keen to avoid interference in their business through taxation or regulation, and by taking substantive voluntary steps, they can often persuade governments and the wider public that they are taking and addressing  issues such as diversity, environment, public health, safety of citizens, etc. seriously as good corporate citizens.

For a VCS organisation, the key to success is in finding a corporate body that shares your vision, and identifies and wishes to be associated with the difference you are trying to make.  Their involvement can take many forms, though more often not financial, to help ensure you can build the skills and capability to deliver those benefits so that they can be directly associated with the success you achieve.

 The SE15 Consortium the Corporate Sector with an easy access channel of communication with organisations and/or issues they wish to associate with, but also with a wider range of people (and potential customers) who can immediately identify with what they are trying to do. Organisations working within the Consortium are inevitably improving their skills and capabilities as part of that way of working, which makes them more attractive as potential partners for companies. 

The SE15 Consortium initiative has the potential to bring benefits to many people and organisations that have a stake in the health and welfare of residents of Peckham and Nunhead.

Charitable Trusts and/or Independent Funders are many and varied with very different motivations for the activities that they support:

• Some seek to empower people;
• Some seek to resource specialist services and/or innovative approaches;
• Some seek to address issues of poverty and disadvantage;
• Others seek to address specific issues/challenges that people face in their lives; and
• Others to provide opportunities that people would not otherwise be able to gain access to.

Whatever the motivation, the SE15 Consortium can provide major opportunities for making better investment in SE15 VCS organisations and people as a result of:

• SE15 organisations working collaboratively to deliver better services;
• Partnerships developing to deliver more holistic approaches to the needs of service users;
• a stronger coordinated voice to advocate for service users (especially the most vulnerable and most isolated within the community, and/or those whose views on changing and improving services often go unheard);
• opportunities for organisations to learn  from each other, improve practice for all, and help build each other’s skills and capacity;
• themselves learning what the Consortium actually achieves in practice; how it works; its success factors; what didn’t work and why; etc.

The SE15 Consortium seeks to enable the many people and organisations,  that work to improve the health and welfare of residents of Peckham and Nunhead, to do so more efficiently and effectively. The kinds of benefits that users of services in SE15 can expect to see include:

•  Quality services that better meet their needs;
•  Clear channels of communication and consultation, enabling even the most isolated to understand how their voice and issues can be progressed to the highest level;
•  Consequently, providing reassurance that views and opinions on improvements will be properly taken account of;
•  Better prioritisation of resources towards those issues of greatest importance to residents;
•  Better inter-communication between VCS organisations and stronger inter-community links.