Patrick O’Meara
Membership Director, Business in the Community, Responsible Business
Business in the Community is an exciting and challenging place to be. Especially when you consider what we can achieve with 850 companies in membership and growing all the time.
We ask our members to do three things to be more responsible: to learn, inspire and lead, to work together to make a positive impact on the key social issues of education, employability, climate change and raising talent, and finally to integrate responsible business practice across all of their operations.
These commitments cover a very wide range of activities from community investment to how companies recruit and employ, their credentials on diversity and equality, how they operate their supply chains, what and how they sell and the impacts they make on our environment. We run a series of campaigns in these areas, occasionally in collaboration with other organisations from The Prince's Charities.
My role as membership director is to make sure that four very important things happen: that we grow significantly, by both holding on to the member companies we have and by bringing new ones into membership; that our companies understand what they've committed to as members and that we deliver on our commitments to them, that we have a great team of account managers who help to achieve this and as a member of the senior management team, to help shape the overall strategy and direction of Business in the Community.
So what makes us tick? Unrelenting campaigning, innovation and a huge optimism that we can change the world. Why does this matter? It matters hugely in this now global economy because of the incontrovertible evidence on climate change, because of the 2.2million children in school in the United Kingdom where no-one at home works, because of the requirement for 16million skilled and professional jobs by 2020, because almost all of the current 6million unskilled jobs will have disappeared by then and because on average women are still paid 17 per cent less for doing the same job.
