Spotlight on our IT team supporting the Charles Russell Speechlys Foundation charity partners

The Charles Russell Speechlys Foundation was set up in September 2020 with an overall mission of advancing justice and an aim to develop multi-layered charity partnerships. An important element of this has been the support provided by Charles Russell Speechlys staff and partners through pro bono legal advice and non-legal volunteering. We have focussed on sharing our resources and expertise to build capacity for the Foundation’s charity partner organisations to better deliver for their beneficiaries.

Our pro bono practice provides a well-established route for our lawyers to share their skills for positive impact. Over the past year we have focussed on providing more opportunities for our business services professionals to do the same. Many of the Foundation’s charity partners are small and have limited resources in business support areas such as HR, IT and Marketing and Communications, so this type of skills-based volunteering has been beneficial.

A great example of this has been the advice our IT Team has provided across four Foundation charity partners. The team has been working with the Charles Russell Speechlys Foundation’s charity partners to assess their tech needs and identify problem areas for their organisation to function more efficiently. They have followed up with advice and assistance on key projects identified including cyber security, video conferencing, learning platforms and optimising the use of CRM systems. So far, we have provided 20+ hours of skills sharing with several projects currently in progress.

Andy Wilson, Head of Technical Operations, said: “Every business uses technology in some way, and this is even more prevalent in the last couple of years when hybrid working has become the norm for our Foundation charity partners. This presents new challenges around security with an increased focus on cyber resilience along with modern collaboration increasingly being performed over video enabled calls.

Not all organisations have the resources of an IT team to keep developing their technology, so that’s where we can help. We are really pleased to be offering our expertise to these charities and it all started with a very simple discussion to understand their key tech challenges and taking each project from there. We were able to identify individuals within our team who have those skills to work alongside the charity and it’s been hugely rewarding being able to rally up support across my team to help our Foundation charity partners.”

Our IT team is continuing to support the Foundation charity partners and scope new projects where they may be to provide further help.