Buy Social Corporate Challenge: Purchase with a purpose

Transcript

Pranav Chopra: When you go and pitch to other corporate clients, they see the PwC logo and that goes a long, long way.

Jenny Costa: It's been fantastic for our brand and ensuring that we've got solid, consistent orders.

Tracey West: A gig with heart. It makes you just realize people's potential.

Lucy Ferguson: We went from a small film production company to say we're working with the global corporate, and that changed everything.

Latifa Kapadia: The social enterprise has come with a real entrepreneurial spirit, and with that comes agility, creativity and innovation.

David Adair: The Buy Social Corporate Challenge is a great way for us to engage with social enterprises and diversify our supply chain. So, for example, we work with social enterprises that work with care leavers or with those at risk of offending or those at risk of homelessness. And it really increases our impact.

Jenny Costa: I started Rubies in 2012 after researching food waste and realizing the scale and the implications of food waste globally, and I wanted to make a product that both was a practical solution to food waste, but also raised awareness of this need to value food again.

Pranav Chopra: NEMI Teas is a London based tea company and a social enterprise. The goal has been trying to sort of upskill as many refugees and place them into full time employment so if no one gives them that first break. How they ever going to get out of that cycle?

Lucy Ferguson: Mediorite is a film production company that works with young people through free training, work, experience and paid work. We promised our clients that the work they give us will create paid work for a young person we've trained.

Russell Botting: We were founded by our founder, Derk who's son was autistic, Derk founded Auticon, on the basis that there's a under-representation of autistic talent in the job market.

Jenny Costa: I met PwC at a Meet The Buyers event and we were a chutney brand at that time and we were wanting to develop into ketchups and mayonnaises and they came across and said, If you develop a ketchup we're going to love it. And it gave us so much confidence in the developing of that process.

Russell Botting: Our relationship with PwC is that PwC support our consultants in our in IT projects and as coaches we provide the autism related support for both the consultants and the PwC teams. All our consultants are autistic on the autism spectrum or have another co-occurring neurodivergent conditions.

Latifa Kapadia: One of the challenges that social enterprises find is a route to market and getting access to big corporates.

Peter Holbrook: PwC is a founding member of the Buy Social Corporate Challenge, brought about kind of a longevity of opportunity and a scale of opportunity that has really enabled many, many of our members to really grow with them over many, many months and sometimes years. Those opportunities don't come around very often.

Pranav Chopra: No real sort of tea start-up has actually been able to break into the corporate market. Lots of aspects of our relationship with PwC has been transformational for the business, it allowed us to break into the whole sort of food service, the catering world. For us it's always been sort of mission driven in terms of we know the more tea we sell, the more refugees we can employ and that can only come through scale.

Lucy Ferguson: I started the business because I really wanted to find a way to get diverse young people into the creative sector. And I believe that diversity brings better ideas.

Jeremy Willis: Part of what we need to do is to help organizations scale with confidence. And what that means in reality is having a forecast pipeline of demand may be shared with other large corporates so that we can enable those social enterprises to scale up without being exposed to peaks and troughs in demand, and so that they can recruit with confidence, make investments with confidence against a well forcast pipeline of demand.

Lucy Ferguson: PwC have really help me understand the value of process and getting it right and the volume of work they've given us has allowed us to scale and get greater impacts for the young people we work with.

Jenny Costa: Through working with PwC It's been fantastic from our brand also from the impact that carbon footprint offsetting has had.

Tracey West: It's a two way thing, in their work. Also works for PwC because it helps them to understand their clients as well. Not just the people that work for them, but the people that they're serving. And the more you understand, the more it's about people, the better it is.

Latifa Kapadia: They're always willing to go the extra mile. It's been really rewarding to see how the firm and our suppliers have built long term, meaningful relationships with the social enterprises over the last six years.

David Adair: With social enterprises has really increased the diversity and inclusiveness of the firm. Be it more women, more people from a different cultural background, those with a different thought as well. So it makes you see things from a different angle.