Words by Abi Scaife
The Corporate Cause section in the Smiley Charity Film Awards is a chance for businesses to demonstrate how they’re giving back. It’s a hugely important and impactful category, allowing us to celebrate their partnerships with charities and causes that benefit our world.
Ahead of the Smiley Charity Film Awards ceremony, we caught up with Oisín Tammas who was the Director of Creative and Content at The Skateroom, one of our Corporate Cause finalists.
The Skateroom is a B Corp which uses its platform to support social skate projects across the world, promoting community, inclusion and education.
The Skateroom commits a portion of its revenue to social skate projects all over the world. Free Movement Skateboarding is unique among the social-skate sector, insofar as it uses a mobile skatepark (ramps in a van) in order to reach at-risk youth in places around and outside Athens which don’t have access to infrastructure. Refugee camps were a big part of this, towards the beginning of the project’s story. However, with government change, small organisations like Free Movement began to be banned from entering these sorts of spaces. The Skateroom saw an opportunity to support Free Movement in its next chapter, building a space that those young people can come to and feel safe and able to express themselves freely, on and off the board.
Capitalism is a game that is easily won by those who have more to start with. It doesn’t encourage redistribution of assets, by its very nature. If every company/corporation committed a portion of their revenue to charity, then a new model of capitalist growth would emerge, one which relies on conscious consumption. If it became the norm that, when you as a consumer buy something, some of that money goes to help those less fortunate, then companies which do not adhere to that model would become outliers and be penalised by their customer-base. The larger a company gets, the more shocking it would be that they do not have a social impact model, and thus attract more negative attention.
The best way any business can support a cause is to democratise its impact model. That means one simple thing: ask what the communities you support actually need. Or else, hire experts who really understand the cause and the best routes to true, lasting impact. Throwing money at a problem, in order to write it off in your taxes, is neither sustainable nor strictly ethical. Social change requires engagement, and outsourcing of decision making to people who live and breathe the cause.
You can see The Skateroom’s video for the Smiley Charity Film Awards here. You can learn more about The Skateroom and its social projects here.
At Smiley Movement, we like to elevate the work of charities across the world. Here are three charities whose causes align with the themes in this article.
Campaign to End Loneliness. This charity campaigns to make sure that people most at risk of loneliness are reached and supported. Support them here.
Samaritans. Samaritans works to make sure there's always someone there for anyone who needs someone. Find out more here.
Equally Ours. This s a UK charity that brings together people and organisations working across equality, human rights and social justice to make a reality of these in everyone’s lives. Find out more here.
This article aligns with the UN SDGs Partnership for the Goals.
