Love Your Communities

The launch in February 2025, sort to unite stakeholders, promote collaboration, and drive community impact. It emphasised the importance of social value and volunteering, especially through procurement processes.

Key Themes and Outcomes

- Social Value: Understanding its role in community development and contractor commitments.
- Volunteering: Encouraging staff and partners to contribute time and skills.
- UN Sustainable Goals: Framed as a jigsaw puzzle with 'Love Your Communities' as the missing piece.

Call to Action

The initiative calls for:
- Volunteers
- Materials
- Funding

Benefits for participants include personal growth, confidence, improved health, networking opportunities, and enhanced team morale.

Next Steps

Feedback regarding the event was very positive with an overall rating of 10 and 9 from every attendee. Key priorities from the evaluation survey told us the people wanted to understand more about social value and have opportunities to volunteer in their local community.

To support these priorities, Thirteen will be launching a new platform to continue to engage stakeholders called Match My Project.

This website will allow businesses to see a project bank of requirements from community organisations for investment, donations in kind and volunteering support to help easily fulfil their social value commitments and create opportunities for local people.

Training and a pilot for this platform will be delivered in July followed by a full launch in September 2025.