Focus
HRH celebrates 25 years as President of Business in the Community - a tribute by Dame Julia Cleverdon
8th July 2010
As The Prince celebrates 25 years as President of Business in the Community, Dame Julia Cleverdon pays tribute to His Royal Highness’s work to mobilise business for good.
"Looking back over the work and influence over 25 years of the Prince of Wales as President of Business in the Community, I am struck by the stark statistics of more than 460 public engagements as well as a huge amount of entrepreneurial energy contained in messages and forewords recorded in the burgeoning Windsor archive.
Nine chairmen have chaired the organisation over his twenty five years and ensured that it is business-led and business-driven and Stephen O’Brien, myself and Stephen Howard have been the ‘hired hands’.
All of us would agree that much of the innovation and courage to take real risks has been inspired by the President, who has been consistently ahead of his time.
The five most important and continuing themes of his Presidency are already clear in his first five-year engagement diary; his environmental concerns; his support for community entrepreneurs; the importance of business leadership; and the quality of a ‘place’ and rural communities.
Evident too is his ability to make connections, convene unusual partners and inspire new ideas. His creative ability to learn from international experience was a rich source of early innovation.
The Presidential Diary shows the arrival of the Boston Compact, an education business deal, in East London. Second Harvest from Canada brought a food recycling programme called Provision which helped to inspire the new charity Fareshare.
A visit to Lowell provided the inspiration for much of the work done in Halifax – complete with Eureka, the Children’s Museum, supported by Vivien Duffield. She asked The Prince of Wales to be the Patron of a new children’s museum in South Kensington. He agreed but only if it was in Halifax!
In 1990 he convened an ambitious gathering of international business leaders in Charleston which spawned the Prince’s International Business Leaders Forum led by him and the irrepressible Robert Davies, which did so much to influence global businesses.
His environmental concerns were apparent early in his Presidency when he launched the Environmental Target team in Blackburn, starred with John Cleese in the film Grime Goes Green, and encouraged the development of the Environmental Index – all before 1992!
His determination to drive the agenda and embed sustainability into business strategy and supply chains has produced continuing innovation launching The Prince’s Mayday Network on climate change in 2006, The Prince’s Rainforest Project in 2008 and indeed the launch of START tonight.
His abiding interest in how businesses manage waste and surplus products, first illustrated in a visit to encourage the Boots Community Recycling initiative in 1992, developed into a new Prince’s charity, In Kind Direct in 1996, which has saved millions of tons of waste from landfill.
He has always believed passionately in supporting community entrepreneurs and scores of individuals have benefited from his encouragement. People who inspired him and have been inspired by him include David Robinson who bought Canning Town Hall for £1 to turn into Community Links; Tony McGann who led the Eldonians in Liverpool; Dick Atkinson and his work with Streetwatch and the Tarmac/Carillion secondees in Balsall Heath. He launched The Times Community Enterprise Awards in the late eighties and championed the Local Investment Fund – a hard-fought attempt to get loan funds for community enterprise.
He commissioned the Directions for the Nineties Report, written by David Grayson – now Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield – which pioneered the first business case for corporate community investment having consulted with business leaders, trade unions and the community sector. In 1992 he visited Swindon to see the employee volunteering work of Allied Dunbar led by Sandy Leitch, which led to the Employees in the Community campaign. This brought the Cares experience from America and has ensured that employee community engagement is now the norm amongst responsible businesses. A belief in the importance of business leadership and the power of mobilising business for good is most clearly seen in the hugely influential Prince’s Seeing is Believing programme, which after 20 years, continues to be the heartbeat of Business in the Community.
He was convinced that senior business leaders could use their skills and energy to tackle community needs, but must listen and understand the challenges first hand. His Seeing is Believing programme grew from his experience of cajoling business leaders to visit Halifax with him. As he honed the process to take numbers to scale, inviting leaders to lead his visits, and holding annual report-backs at St James’s Palace, he ensured that business leaders – now some 8000 alumni strong – would never forget their visit, nor their commitment to lead change in their business. And, he in turn, was relentless in never forgetting the promises they made on the transformational visits! He was remorseless in focusing on stretching targets and finding more challenging areas to concentrate on. He once said to me, “Don’t keep me or them on the nursery slopes – we need to be on the face of the Eiger!” His Presidential memos often begin “I wonder – for what it’s worth – if we could run a series of Seeing is Believing visits on...” and so new and tougher areas for development are floated.
He has always been generous in forgiving failure and delighted about success and has pioneered a range of ground-breaking initiatives, many developed from Seeing is Believing ideas. These include improving business support to inner city schools, identifying how business can help homeless people into work and supporting young Muslims. Sometimes we were unsuccessful – we gave up trying to twin senior business and prison leadership teams.
Championing rural communities has always been close to The Prince’s heart and in 2001 the year before Foot and Mouth, he led business leaders on visits to rural areas to understand better the profound change they were experiencing and identify ways to stem decline. The Prince’s Rural Action programme was started and initiatives catalysed to regenerate market towns, boost the provision of affordable housing and encourage more local sourcing of food. HRH’s private sector led Affordable Housing Initiative played a key role in putting this issue firmly on the Government’s agenda. His visit to the St Austell brewery produced the famous Princely phrase “The Pub is the Hub.” This initiative has supported 350 communities in keeping the social heart of the village alive by providing a range of services under one pub roof.
The national roll out of Women in Rural Enterprise (WIRE) which provides business support to thousands of female rural entrepreneurs, came from a Presidential engagement at Harpur Adams. His personal passion and belief in the importance of the small family farmer led him to create his Farmers Marketing Initiative. A wide range of BITC companies helped to establish a series of hill farmer co-operatives in England, Wales and Scotland to improve route to market and business viability. More recently, HRH has worked with a number of major food brands to support his Countryside Fund which will give these kinds of grassroots projects a helping hand.
What else has been the hallmark of his Presidency? A passionate belief in the importance of the quality and sustainability of a place. His commitment to one town partnerships has its latest expression in Burnley, where 10 of his charities are working together. He has always been clear that if communities are to be transformed in the long term, they need business engagement and enterprise encouragement, but above all they require a real focus on the built environment and the heritage of a place. At various times, Business in the Community has acted as a catalyst and support – firstly to Urban Villages, which later joined the new Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, and then to the forerunner of The Prince’s Regeneration Trust. On a visit to Manchester in the late nineties, he said to me, “All I want to celebrate this millennium is to save 40 mills for the next!” and Regeneration through Heritage – chaired by Bill Castell was begun. True to his target, more than 40 mills have been saved and are now widely agreed to be vital ingredients in the regeneration of a place. As well as his five key themes, his Presidency has placed a priority on measuring and evaluating progress and celebrating success.
He expected that business leaders would want to apply the same principles of professional benchmarking and measurement to their activities with BITC as any other for which there was a strong business case. Launching the PerCent club in 1987, encouraging the Environment Leadership team to develop the Environmental Index in 1992, and commissioning the Impact on Society report in 2001, all led to the development of the Corporate Responsibility Index. His determination to ensure independent evaluation of large-scale initiatives produced important long-term results, particularly the Partners in Leadership programme first developed by KPMG. It was the ensuing McKinsey review of the effectiveness of twinning business leaders with Head Teachers which gave Business in the Community and London First the evidence and drive to develop Teach First – of which The Prince of Wales is now Patron.
He has always understood the need to drive innovation and celebrate success through the annual Awards for Excellence, and made his own important contribution by choosing his national and regional Ambassadors. I suspect, however, that the success of which he is most proud is the impact that businesses have made through mobilising their mainstream resources – to tackle climate change, improve skills, reduce homelessness and account and market more sustainably. He is always determined that the organisation should never rest on its laurels, or be complacent about its progress.
This occasion gives us all the opportunity to thank the President for his inspiration, determination and leadership over 25 years."