Our community
Giving back to our communities and building meaningful relationships
What is the scheme?
At its heart, it is an opportunity for our people to give something back to their communities and the causes they care about by taking a paid volunteering day each year. The scheme is open to everybody in the firm, and will enable them to volunteer their time and skills in a way that also helps develop their skills and experience.
How does it work?
We have deliberately kept the scheme simple to encourage participation. While we have identified a number of specific volunteering opportunities in line with our values, we also recognise that many of our people have causes they are passionate about, and want to support them with those activities as well.
While participating in the scheme is optional, we want to impress upon our teams that taking part is looked upon favourably in the context of their own development. Giving back is a responsibility we take seriously, so we want our people to take it seriously too.
Giving back is a responsibility we take seriously, so we want our people to take it seriously too.
What is the plan for its implementation?
The scheme is in its early stages, but we have already begun to build a database of opportunities to inspire potential volunteers and ensure that the activities we are undertaking are aligned with our values. It is important that we are supporting communities local to our offices, and that activities are in the areas of access to justice, social mobility, the environment or equality and diversity, and are of meaningful benefit to the recipient.
We also want to encourage people to participate in groups where possible as there is a clear team-building benefit to this. This sort of work is possible when we partner with organisations like the Kingston Foodbank, local to our office, who are included in our database of volunteering opportunities, and who ask for support in sorting and packing as part of a team-building activity day.
In time, we expect our database to grow, and to develop a way of collating feedback from those who participate to ensure the scheme meets it’s objectives and is a success.
What specific opportunities are available within the scheme?
The volunteering opportunities that are available to all are not intended to be static, and will grow and change over time. Currently, initiatives we are encouraging people to participate in include supporting Wimbledon and Putney Commons with scrub clearance and litter picking, Friends of Richmond Park with conservation activities, the Whitechapel Mission with their breakfast and clothing challenges, and Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre with providing riding lessons to children with learning difficulties and physical disabilities.
What activities has the firm undertaken so far?
In the past year, teams of Russell-Cooke staff volunteered with the charity team’s client UK for UNHCR, in support of its collaboration with British artist Es Devlin: CONGREGATION, held at Somerset House and sponsored by Kings College London. This was a collective portrait piece, featuring 50 portraits of Londoners who have experienced forced displacement.
Another volunteering day was used to run a singing workshop in Europe’s largest women’s prison HMP Bronzefield, with the stated aim of breaking down social barriers, fostering human connection and increasing confidence. In the words of one volunteer, for these women, the opportunity to engage in a creative and uplifting activity offered a temporary escape from the bleak monotony of life behind bars.
As a leading law firm, we recognise there are particular skills we can offer, and particular synergies between our activities and those of the organisations we support.
Why have we created this scheme in particular?
As a leading law firm, we recognise there are particular skills we can offer, and particular synergies between our activities and those of the organisations we support. Giving back to our communities is one of our core values, but beyond that, we hope the scheme will enable us to build meaningful relationships with the organisations and communities we support over time.
There is a view that corporate volunteering can be tokenistic. We are committed to ensuring that the activities carried out as part of the scheme are done so in the context of wider relationships and make a genuine positive and lasting impact. To that end, we want to make a distinction between undertaking ad hoc voluntary activities, and cultivating robust and reciprocal relationships with the organisations we support. As the scheme evolves, we want to be able to identify charities that do fantastic work in line with our values, and commit to volunteering with them regularly to sustain that longer-term relationship.
What do we hope the scheme will achieve?
Our people already have a very strong track record of getting involved in their communities, whether in their personal lives or through the firm. We support a number of local and national charities through sponsorships and staff fundraising events, from attending the London Legal Walk and, alongside Uber Boats, being the principal sponsors of the Kingston Half Marathon through to local sports clubs and arts organisations. Many of our people volunteer as charity trustees – including most members of our charity team. As recently as Christmas 2024, charity partner Carla Whalen was interviewed on the BBC News at One commenting on the King’s decision to record the Christmas speech at The Fitzrovia Chapel of which she is Chair of trustees.
The introduction of the volunteering scheme is an opportunity to formalise this, and to send a clear message that community work is supported and enabled by the firm. It further embeds our dedication to this work into our responsible business and overall firm strategies, and will allow us to effectively measure and set objectives around our volunteering activities.
As a firm, we appreciate we are privileged to be in a position to undertake this work, and acknowledge that we have a responsibility to give back. We are also acutely aware that others – whether that is clients, peers or potential recruits – rightly expect us to take social responsibility seriously, and it is our duty to meet that expectation.
As a firm, we appreciate we are privileged to be in a position to undertake this work, and acknowledge that we have a responsibility to give back.
Where do you feel the firm can make the most impact with the scheme?
It is an implied condition of the scheme that any activity undertaken must be genuinely beneficial to the recipient, but there are certain areas where the positive impact we can make as lawyers is particularly pronounced. An example of this is our work with local law centres, where we volunteer to provide free legal advice to those who can otherwise not afford it, typically on social welfare issues. Expanding access to justice is at the heart of our mission at Russell-Cooke; volunteering with a law centre is a fantastic way for our people to support us in this mission, at the same time as putting their legal knowledge and skills into practice.
What does community involvement mean to Russell-Cooke?
Beyond supporting our communities being a key tenet of our ethos, we have one of the leading charity legal teams in the country. This gives us a particular understanding of and insight into charities and their needs, and the ways a business like ours can provide voluntary support that is actually useful. Doing the right thing informs how we operate as a firm. It is hugely important that we support our communities in whatever way we can.
What supporting our communities means to me
James Underwood
Trainee
Neither individuals nor businesses exist in a vacuum, and it's perfectly possible to use our professional endeavours both to generate profit and make the world a better place.
Alison Cross
Senior associate
I’m excited to give back to the community in any way I can.
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