ECD
Founded upon an ethos of sustainability and the promotion of sustainable communities, we provide community benefits – including work placements, career days, workshops, lectures, CPD and support for community activities – as part of our corporate social responsibility and what we feel is right. ECD has supported and continues to support CRASH‚ a charity dedicated to helping homelessness charities and hospices with vital construction projects‚ through a number of fundraising and volunteering opportunities throughout the year; including office bake offs, fun runs and half marathons. Each member of staff is given one volunteer day every year to use to support a local community we may be working with or a cause of their choice. When taking on a new commission, we assess with the stakeholders the right way in which we can contribute to the local community, be it through local volunteering opportunities, fundraising or in-kind donations to support local causes.

Studio Knight Stokoe
Our practice actively supports charities, community groups, social enterprises, action groups, and others through various means. We are committed to donating a minimum of one per cent of our annual turnover as part of our commitment to 1% for the Planet, which directly contributes to environmental causes and organisations.

Additionally, we have a Charity and Pro-bono Services policy that encourages employees to engage in charitable causes. Our employees are granted up to 40 hours of paid time per year to dedicate towards pro-bono work or volunteering for non-profit organisations. We prioritise supporting independent local businesses within a 10- mile radius of our studio. Through these initiatives, we aim to foster a culture of giving back to the community, supporting causes that align with our values, and promoting the local economy.

PRP
Our Head of People & Culture is responsible for our Social Value offerings and sits on an ESG steering group with three board partners. The steering group reviews the work we do within the communities we serve. We have five Social Value Champions who work within each division and they are responsible for promoting and capturing people’s volunteering activites. We give employees one day a year to volunteer to a charity of their choice and we have assigned a timesheet code for people to record any social value activities they have taken part in. Our bids team curates SV reports on a quarterly basis which ‘capture impact statements, time given, money raised and photographs. These reports are circulated to our people to recognise and celebrate their contributions

Tate+Co
We work with Open City, the RIBA and the Grimshaw Foundation, at which Tate+Co is a trustee, to regularly deliver educational workshops for children and outreach programmes. In particular these are focused on schools in diverse or disadvantaged communities as our aim through this work is to improve the diversity of those entering the profession.

We are supporters of the London Neighbourhood Scholarship programme where, as a group of practices, we financially support diverse students through their university architecture training. As a side note we also actively encourage our staff to participate in charity cycle rides and fun-runs, through time off and financial support, which helps raise many thousands of pounds for charity each year.

Marks Barfield Architects
Since its inception in 1989 the practice has been embedded in the local community and has throughout carried out both pro-bono and cost only work for charities and good causes. We have worked on a variety of projects for Oasis Play Group in Stockwell by providing services pro-bono to submit planning applications on their behalf and in one case helped them source, deconstruct and re-build a demountable Walter Segal building from a Coin Street Builders plot through our contacts on the South Bank. Additionally, we have also carried out a number of small-scale refurbishment projects for Clapham Omnibus Theatre.

Our involvement with the London Eye saw our community activity widen to incorporate the Southbank where we were able to embed our most notable charitable initiative which ensures that one per cent of ticket sales go to the local community in perpetuity.

Morrow + Lorraine
We are one of four practices founding the Build The Way programme which offers a nine-month paid traineeship in practice as an alternative route into architecture for persons of lower socio-economic backgrounds who potentially do not have the financial means or academic credentials to study at University. All the work offered to the programme is currently pro bono. We also donate clothing, IT, and furniture to local communties and hold fundraiser events such as our open studio event with the London Festival of Architecture.

Worldchanging Institute
We provide design and advisory services pro bono for communities in need. Most recently we developed and built 12 schools for Syrian refugees.

Assemble
This is predominantly done through projects where we constantly work to create social impact. We have a dedicated company: Assemble Studio CIC, set up to enable these. We run a project called House of Annetta in Spitalfields dedicated to social justice and systems change. Through this we support a number of community initiatives and campaigns in the Brick Lane area as well as offering space for researchers working in a variety of disciplines at the intersection of spatial and social justice.

Another example is our Assemble Play project which offers free-to-access loose parts play across London. This supports children and their carers and families in these communities such as the recent Grenfell Play project which ran for a year at the base of Grenfell Tower or the current work we are doing at Mudchute City Farm.