Community

Our Community Programme harnesses the goodwill, energy, skills and resources of local businesses wanting to extend their positive impact across the local community. The BID enables our members to do this in a time-effective way, aligned to their community engagement priorities and ensuring maximum impact.

In 10 years, Marble Arch businesses have donated almost 5,000 hours of volunteering to local projects. We have achieved this by organising and facilitating practical team challenges and skilled volunteering opportunities for over 1,500 employees across our membership.

Since the launch of the programme in 2016, the BID has supported one in four of our members to regularly volunteer in more than 40 local schools, charities, and social enterprises. Volunteers have supported a wide range of initiatives such as improving the local environment and outdoor spaces, reducing isolation among older people by running coffee mornings, addressing the cost-of-living through food banks, providing careers guidance to students, and upskilling local charities to become more robust.

From its inception, the Community Programme has played a key role in mobilising multiple companies to support national campaigns on larger scale projects. This included facilitating volunteers during The Great British Spring Clean, the nation’s biggest mass-action environmental campaign, and Silver Sunday, the national day for older people which has its origins in Westminster.

Skilled volunteering became a feature of our Community Programme from 2019. Starting in schools, this has now expanded to a range of settings including charity offices, care homes, community hubs and youth centres, and is the fastest growing area of our programme. This has enabled the vast and diverse skillsets and expertise that exist across our BID area to extend to the community. This includes IT specialists delivering digital drop-ins for older people and, more recently, bank employees providing financial literacy workshops for young people.

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we created a suite of virtual volunteering opportunities to enable community engagement to continue during lockdown. This included organising companionship calls to isolated elderly residents and online careers workshops for school pupils.

More recently we have introduced regular intergenerational and pupil enrichment activities for our school members, as well as establishing a Community Working Group for ESG leads and like-minded employees to come together to discuss shared volunteering challenges. We have also improved our evaluation processes to better understand the benefits of volunteering on employees. Survey data consistently indicates our Community Programme improves wellbeing, strengthens relationships with colleagues, and helps provide a deeper understanding of the realities facing community partners.

In addition to offering their time and skills, Marble Arch businesses donate and fundraise for local good causes. Our business members have given generously across the first 10 years of the BID, and last year the annual value of donated items exceeded £40,000.

A key feature of the way we support donations is through our annual Festive Donation Drive. At this time of year, we receive multiple requests from our membership wanting to make donations. Each year we compile and distribute a Wish List to our business members of items local charities request. This has included winter clothing and toiletries for a women’s refuge, as well as gift-wrapped Christmas presents for disabled children and those with life-limiting conditions.

We also encourage BID members to donate their surplus stock year-round. During office moves or renovations, items such as unwanted tables, chairs and laptops have helped kit out school classrooms and charity offices. This has resulted in cost savings for community partners, while businesses avoid disposal fees and reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. This even extends to donating pumpkins used for a hotel Halloween display to a local church to be turned into a hearty soup for those experiencing homelessness.

Utilising our network of local community partners, we have helped channel a wide range of offers from our business members to deserving community causes, including client experiences such as a spa retreat for staff and residents of an older people’s care home.

In 2023, we began coordinating donations and collections alongside longer-term volunteering projects. With the growth in community members using food banks due to the increased cost of living, we helped mobilise food donations from multiple businesses alongside regular weekly volunteer support for a local social supermarket. This provided an opportunity for volunteers to interact with service users and see first-hand the impact of their donations.

For more details on how we support donations please refer to our Charitable Giving Policy.

Since 2018 we have been celebrating the amazing people whose jobs we often take for granted and those who keep our area moving behind the scenes. Our Hidden Heroes online series features 54 unsung members of the community who have shared their stories. Heroes from schools, hotels, offices, churches, shops, construction companies, charities, resident associations, British Transport Police and London Underground all feature. Hidden Heroes is a way of breaking down barriers and forging new connections, recognising the critical role everyone in the district plays.

Marble Arch London BID advocates for the entire district, representing our members on key issues affecting the area and their operations. We speak up for local businesses to ensure local needs are considered by Westminster City Council, TfL, the Metropolitan Police, the Mayor of London, and national government. We also partner with our neighbouring BIDs to lobby jointly and amplify our impact, through a single Westminster BIDs public affairs contract. At a more local level we are an active member of our two Neighbourhood Forums (Hyde Park Paddington and Marylebone) on either side of Edgware Road and continue to work closely with local resident societies.

Our training programme has grown to be a valuable service for our members for all their accredited training needs. We now successfully run a combination of in-person and online training providing a broad selection of courses. We continue to partner with the Red Cross for our dedicated First Aid Courses which we run bi-annually as well as on demand for businesses who need staff trained quickly in this vital skill. Mental Health First Aid is now held in January with places quickly filling up to capacity. Other sessions we have offered include a ‘Stress to Strength’ workshop, a Menopause Awareness seminar, plus a wide range of security and resilience briefings under our crime and security portfolio.

Our online training provides members with user-friendly logins on request and offers many options including Fire Marshal and DSE (Display Screen Equipment), Food & Hygiene, Health, Safety & Welfare, Diversity and Inclusion Awareness, Deaf Awareness and Project Kestrel Fire Awareness. Our newly expanded online range also includes Mental Health Awareness, Cyber security Awareness, Stress Awareness, Data Protection and GDPR Awareness and Environmental Awareness at Home and at Work. Each year on average between 40 and 50 BID companies including hotels, offices, retailers, schools, bars and restaurants sign up over 100 colleagues to our training courses.