Our first Impact Report: Driven to deliver better

Take a minute. How often do you get to take a step back and reflect on the work that you’re doing?

For many of us, keeping on top of the ‘To Do’ lists – both professional and personal – is an all-consuming endeavour. Opportunities to pause, consider and plan for better are rare and precious. At the start of our B Corp journey, the certification process forced us into a period of robust self-reflection. Preparing our Impact Report has done the same. It tracks our first full calendar year as a B Corp: 1 January to 31 December 2022.

Looking back at 2022, we’re proud to see that our geographic reach has spread further across the country – with more than half of our projects now sited outside London. Our commitment to socially-engaged processes has continued, with over 5,400 people having engaged with our projects across the year through events, workshops and surveys.

We’re delighted to have supported our local authority clients in securing £78.3m to deliver impactful projects in their places through strategic thinking and feasibility work. The ‘little things’ are no less important. This report spotlights projects through which impacts or innovation has been delivered in 2022, including the conclusion of our RE—SET—GO initiative supporting diversity in architectural practices, the people-friendly transformation of an industrial estate in Waltham Forest and delivering lively night-markets and youth programming with partners in Bexleyheath.

There is an amount of introspection involved in this process too. We’ve been looking at practical ways that we can improve transparency, accountability and fairness for our team, supported by our Head of People, a new role for 2022.

Our first Impact Report looks across 2022 and 61 projects, which include:

• 16 urban research studies
• 25 strategies and masterplans
• 20 public spaces and buildings

The focus of our activity has been in London, town centres in the wider south east and a cluster of projects in the north west. Our work also brought us to the West Midlands, Bristol and coastal locations of Margate, Ramsgate, Folkestone, Southend-on-Sea, Brighton and St Ives.

100% of our clients were public sector, third sector, and charities.

Across these places we:

• audited 478 hectares of industrial land supporting 226,000 jobs
• mapped 2,227 spaces that host and support cultural and creative activities including artists’ studios, music venues, workspaces, manufacturing facilities
• led positive change in 48 high streets and town centres
• held 124 events and workshops
• involved 5,400+ people in direct engagement with our project development processes
• delivered the majority of our projects in low- or moderate-income neighbourhoods

We’ve always known we want to be impactful in our actions. We’ve known we want to be a force for good. We now have sharpened clarity on how we best take decisions that quantify and evidence what ‘good’ means.

Understanding and evidencing impact is at the core of being better, including the economic and social well-being of the communities in which we operate and the role we take in creating high-quality, inclusive project outcomes.

We’ll now be reporting on our impacts annually.

We hope you will continue to follow our drive to deliver better for our clients, our team, our communities and for the planet.

Read our first Impact Report: Driven to deliver better