By Julia Lynch, Founding Director of Global Girl Project
As businesses of all sizes are looking for innovative and impactful ways to share their knowledge, expertise, and resources with charities of all sizes, I felt like it would be helpful and important to share with you a story. I want to give you an example of how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) done from the perspective of true partnership, real impact, and connection, can truly create the change that you want to see for your company and the charities you support.
It was a lifetime ago that I first moved to the UK and set up shop here for a couple of years looking for a new beginning to the life I thought I was meant to live. During this time I worked as a Social Worker in Islington and then in Hammersmith & Fulham, and it was during this time that I first met Marli Gray. We worked together in this support service for teenagers with our desks across from each other, her coming here from Australia and me escaping my life in Canada. We became friends, but not super close friends, and this was the time before Facebook, so we didn’t really have any way to stay in touch once we both moved back to our respective countries.
Fast track to 2015, ten years later and enough time for Facebook to have infiltrated our lives, and I was living in Los Angeles and had founded Global Girl Project. We were very, very small back then, only the percolation of what she has become now, but I shared about Global Girl Project’s journey on social media when I had any spare time while working as a behaviour therapist with families. So you can imagine my surprise when I received a message via messenger from Marli, saying that she had been following our work and would love to send a donation to help me to continue on the path.
The year progressed and I continued to work on Global Girl Project during any of my spare time, until in 2016 I had another message from Marli, saying that they would love to offer some pro-bono support from their company Nomat, reviewing our very basic website to see where it could be improved. I, of course, jumped at the offer and what came from this was the most beautiful gift: a brand new, professionally done, website! Nomat so generously designed and got up and running our current website, and provided us with a way to tell our story to the larger world. As a tiny charity, we did not have the resources to create our own professional website and so this new website was a game-changer for us. Over the years we have had hundreds of compliments on our website and this is all down to the long hours and dedication that the Nomat team put into this offering.
While already feeling so grateful for the gift of our impactful and informative website, I received yet another email from Marli and the Nomat team, offering to do a rebranding for us. The offer was to design our very own logo, brand colours, fonts, etc and to be honest, I didn’t even know that organisations had their own brand fonts. So I of course accepted this once-in-a-lifetime offer and started on a journey with the Nomat team of delving deeper into who Global Girl Project really was and how we wanted that represented to the outside world. After many months of working together, over Zoom and emails (I was in Los Angeles and they were in Australia), we were gifted what you now think of and see today as the Global Girl Project logo and all of our brand elements that surround it. This offering took us as an organisation to the next level, and in reality, helped us to appear much more professional and much larger than perhaps we were at the time.
As the years have passed Nomat and their dedication to Global Girl Project has impacted our work in so many ways, and yet the story doesn’t stop here. Near the end of 2022, Nomat reached out yet again to ask if they could help us with anything else, and of course, I jumped at their offer. And so over the past five months, we have been working alongside the Nomat team once again, to create our brand new Journey of a Girl, and the revamping of our original website! I can’t wait to see what you think.
I am sharing our journey with Nomat because I think it is one of the best examples out there of how businesses can implement real and impactful CSR initiatives. For a small charity like GGP, the opportunity to work alongside another team for an extended period of time on a large project is worth far more than its weight in gold. And I would urge all businesses to look at how you can change your CSR and staff volunteering initiatives in a way that they create real impact, as opposed to one day out of the year with an organisation or two.
Thank you doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling, Nomat Team! If your company is also motivated to offer real and impactful CSR to a growing international charity, then please reach out to us at info@globalgirlproject.org.