By Piers Clanford
I was honoured to take up the role of Chair of Trustees of the Berkeley Foundation this year. Having supported this unique charity over the last 12 years from within Berkeley Group, I have seen its fantastic partnerships in action and their hugely positive impacts within our communities. My appreciation has deepened even further since becoming a Trustee.
I have spent my first few months in this new role meeting our charity partners and deepening my understanding of their work and the challenges they face. I was particularly struck by a visit to South London charity CARAS, who work with young refugees and asylum seekers during their first years in the UK. We cooked and shared lunch with a group of young people and heard about how the charity is providing practical support and helping them build community during an immensely challenging period of their lives.
Inspirational volunteers and young people, like those we met at CARAS, exist in every corner of the country and provide us with endless motivation to improve our work and deliver on our purpose. I am really proud that since the launch of our 2030 strategy three years ago, the Foundation has distributed more funding to our local communities than ever before.
In the last 12 months, we have renewed our long-term Strategic Partnerships with Crisis and Lord’s Taverners. We are continuing our work with Crisis to take a place-based approach to tackling homelessness in Brent, supporting their work with the Local Authority and others to bring about system change and reduce the numbers of people experiencing homelessness in the borough. The first few months of the new partnership have seen Brent become the first community in the UK to adopt ‘Built for Zero’, a ground-breaking approach to gathering information into what is called a ‘by-name’ list to better understand individual needs in the journey to end homelessness in a local area.
Through our renewed partnership with Lord’s Taverners, meanwhile, we continue to support the provision of year-round cricket coaching and competition for disabled young people. Reaching over 1,500 young people each year, the new partnership supports the Taverners’ goal to extend cricket provision into every community and every SEND school in the UK. It will also help us in our work with The Berkeley Group business to provide employability sessions for young people taking part in the programme.
As well as supporting brilliant frontline work, the Berkeley Foundation is committed to strengthening the voluntary sector, during what has been an extremely challenging few years. We have continued our programme of unrestricted cost-of-living grants this year and have been working with 20 small-to-medium sized charities and Community Interest Companies (CICs) through our Resilience Fund, which aims to help build resilience for the future. Ten youth employment organisations, and ten organisations supporting the mental health of young people from global majority communities, are taking part.
None of this would be possible without the support of incredible colleagues from across the Berkeley Group, who give their time, skills and money to support the work of the Foundation. This year, staff raised and donated an amazing £941,000 to the Foundation and our charity partners. They also volunteered a record-breaking 1,992 hours of their time. A staggering 61% of Berkeley colleagues chose to get involved in our work – a figure we are justifiably proud of. Thank you all for your continued support.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the Foundation’s founding Chair, Rob Perrins, who has led the charity since its formation in 2011 and has made an immense contribution to its work. Under his guidance, the Berkeley Foundation has grown its grant-making, deepened its impact, and developed into one of the UK’s leading corporate foundations with a unique and hugely effective long term partnership model. I’m pleased to say that Rob will be staying on as a Trustee.
I also want to thank my fellow Trustees; Liz Adekunle, Alison Dowsett, and Wendy Pritchard, as well as the Foundation team led by Sally Dickinson.
Looking ahead, the Berkeley Foundation remains absolutely committed to supporting young people and communities to thrive. We will be investing more than £10 million in our local communities over that period, deepening our existing partnerships, and developing some exciting new ones. I am very much looking forward to supporting the excellent Berkeley Foundation team to take our work forward and fulfil our purpose, ‘to help young people overcome barriers, improve their lives and build a fairer society’.