Open Surgeries – Join Us Online

Hello everyone, 

First of all, how are you?  We hope you are fit, healthy and finding ways to navigate emotionally and physically through this rapidly changing scenario we find ourselves in.  

It’s been a while since we last checked in with you all.  We are sure that like most of you, plans have changed, halted and changed again over the last few weeks and will probably continue to do so over the forthcoming weeks. 

It’s taken a week or so for us at CHY to find a ‘new normal’ and its highly probable that this ‘new normal’ is likely to evolve more as the world, the UK and our families learn to deal with these ‘unprecedented times’.  (We really didn’t want to use that term but couldn’t think of an alternative that summed the situation up!)

Fortunately, as a small team, working together over many years, with working relationships that have evolved into real friendships, we have been able to support one another since Covid-19 became a daily part of our conversations.  From the initial shock, throughout the sporadic waves of terror and worry that take hold unexpectedly to the realisation of what we could be up against both personally and professionally, our team is working hard to pull together, stay realistically positive and get through.  We hope you have a similar network in place too and encourage you to become a bigger part of ours. We firmly believe that if ever there was a time to work and pull together, that time is now.  

Our biggest professional concern throughout this scenario relates to the place Social Value will take in industry as and when normal life resumes.  Will emphasis be placed on the importance of social value because more people and businesses recognise how their actions impact upon society more?  Or will (perhaps our biggest fear) social value return to be a ‘nice to have’, tick box exercise irrelevant to the fundamental purpose of businesses?  This of course is a hugely paraphrased summary of our discussions recently, but one that we would like to discuss with as many of you as we can.  

In an effort to bring more people together, in the forthcoming weeks we will be hosting a number of free open surgeries online and we invite you all to be a part of these.  Our initial aim is to keep these fairly off script, with no specific agenda to find out your general concerns for industry and social value, but it may well be that as a result of the open surgeries, more specific content will be discussed and ideas and thoughts shared in weekly online discussions.  We hope to cover all aspects of social value from what social value means, how it is delivered, measured and reported on, best practice, the challenges we currently face and how we all emerge from this uncertain and worrying period of time

We will soon be sharing details of the open surgeries and hope that you will join us.  If you would like more information to be sent directly to you, please like or comment on this post. 

But for now, stay safe and stay at home.  

Thinking of you all.