Most of us in the IP professions made some lucky career choices and have reaped the rewards.
And most of us want to give something back.
If you’re looking for suitable charities or community interest groups to partner with, the Careers in Ideas team have just the resource for you: a directory of organisations that specialise in helping young people from less privileged backgrounds, or other under-represented groups, into professional careers. This is a FREE resource for IP professionals, new for Careers in Ideas Week, and it’s there to help you identify opportunities to give back to the community whilst also improving diversity in the IP sector.
Whether you’d like to support a specific campaign; set up a longer-term partnership with your organisation; or offer mentoring, advice or inspiring stories as an individual IP professional, we guarantee there will be someone in this directory who’d love to hear from you.
So why not take a look, and find yourself a really special project to mark Careers in Ideas Week?
Who are these organisations?
Many of the organisations in our directory were represented at a 23 September 2020 “think tank” meeting, co-hosted by the IP Federation and IP Inclusive, to discuss social mobility and access to the IP professions. They all have an interest in promoting social mobility as well as, in many cases, other forms of diversity.
What’s in it for me?
Aside from the obvious moral case, which is actually going to be the biggest driver for most people, there are strong business reasons for partnering with organisations like this. Your stakeholders – clients, suppliers, investors and employees – are likely to want to see you engaging in some form of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) work. It can therefore generate positive PR and stronger relationships.
It can also boost your own recruitment efforts, giving you access to a more diverse talent pool and thus the chance to broaden and strengthen your teams. You’ll meet people you might otherwise have overlooked – or who might never have heard of, or thought themselves capable of, careers in IP – yet who have much to contribute.
Working with the outreach organisations we’ve identified will help you ensure that any support you provide reaches the right people, in the right way. That saves you reinventing the wheel, and maximises the return you’ll get for the time, money and goodwill you invest.
Download the directory
You can download our spreadsheet summary of outreach organisations, and the directory containing more detailed information about many of the listed organisations, on our resources page here. And there’s more about some of them in our series of “featured charities” posts that we’ve been publishing to mark Careers in Ideas Week: these posts can be found on our Careers in Ideas Week page.
Please keep us in the loop
If you make use of the directory, we’d be really grateful if you fed back to us about your experiences. Who did you contact? How did it go? Is there anything we can help you promote, or any advice you can share with other IP professionals as a result? How could we improve the quality of the information in the directory?
Please email [email protected] to tell us your story.
The caveats (of course!)
Please note that the information supplied in these documents is from the organisations themselves or the public domain; it doesn’t necessarily imply endorsement by Careers in Ideas or IP Inclusive, so we advise you to make your own checks as well.
Not all of the listed organisations are registered charities, but all appear to have a strong community focus.
If you know of other outreach organisations…
..please let us know. We’ll be delighted to add them to our directory, particularly if they’ve already worked with IP professionals.