Sustainability allies: meet Ruth Griffin and Georgina Houghton

Meet Ruth Griffin, partner in our Construction and Engineering team, and Georgina Houghton, responsible business manager in our Responsible Business team.

Ruth acted as lead member of the firm’s executive team responsible for overseeing our role as Official Sponsors and Official Legal Advisers to the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games (B2022). Her day-to-day role focused on overseeing the delivery of legal services to the B2022 Organising Committee and entailed working with many people across the firm – including the Responsible Business team in terms of delivering social value from our involvement with the Games.

In this, the next in our ‘sustainability allies’ blog series, we talk to Ruth and Georgina about the firm’s work in this area during the Games and beyond. Creating social value is an important element in our overall ESG strategy, which focuses on four priorities: corporate governance; people, inclusion and wellbeing; environment; and responsible business.

To find out more about our ESG initiatives, take a look at our Sustainability report 2023.

Your name and role at Gowling WLG:

Ruth: Ruth Griffin, partner, Construction and Engineering team, Gowling WLG.

Georgina: Georgina Houghton, responsible business manager, Responsible Business team, Gowling WLG

Tell us about your role in this…

Ruth: Well, my official title was “Operational Lead for Legal Services” – OLLS for short – however, this developed to take on a broader remit over time. Together with Michael Luckman, fellow partner and general counsel at Gowling WLG, I worked closely with many other stakeholders across the firm to ensure we maximised the benefits of the firm’s role as legal advisers and sponsors – positively impacting our people, clients and wider community.

Georgina: I actually started my Games journey in the Leadership team, helping with our original tender to become Official Legal Advisers to the Games. I moved into the role of responsible business manager just a few months before the Games opened, so the credit for our social value delivery should really go to my predecessors.

The Responsible Business team co-ordinated all of our community activities as part of our involvement in the Games – ultimately delivering £1 million+ of social value to the Birmingham and West Midlands region.

How did this project come about?

Ruth: As well as playing our part in helping to deliver the Games, we really wanted to embrace its wider ethos through supporting its commitment to creating social value. We saw this as an opportunity to re-define and re-shape how we’re able to make a positive impact on our communities as a legal services provider. For us, a key focus was to make a difference in our local community in support of the Social Value Charter that sat at the core of the Games – and which we helped to draft – and the Commonwealth Games Federation’s own “Mission”.

Tell us more about what the project entailed?

Georgina: The focus on delivering social value really resonated with our own values and so throughout this landmark project we strove to amplify our existing community and charitable work, helping drive further change.

We had always supported local charities and community organisations with needs-led volunteering, pro bono legal advice and fundraising. During the Games, we extended this work in a number of ways, such as:

• providing £50,000 in grants to five grassroots charities. This money was provided to enable them to take the Games to their service users – they organised Commonwealth or sport-related events and initiatives. 
• making event tickets available to services users and volunteers; and
• arranging for Perry the Bull to make appearances at community events. Read more in our story about the legacy we are proud to have been part of.

We also became charity partners of United by 2022 – Birmingham 2022’s official charity – and ran various fundraising activities during Games time, including an extraordinary charity football game at Aston Villa Football Club.

At the same time, we set up some new volunteering and pro bono programmes – for instance, we provided mentors to the Black Social Entrepreneurs Futures programme, in partnership with the School for Social Entrepreneurs. And we provided legal training to female social entrepreneurs in conjunction with the  Initiative for Social Entrepreneurs (ISE).

What were some of the main challenges to delivering our aims around social value during the Games and how did you help overcome them?

Ruth: A key challenge was delivering meaningful impact during the pandemic. Our strategy focused on creating social value throughout our engagement, so it started in May 2020, carried on through Games-time, and beyond. Social value is driven by people and face-to-face engagement: so creating impact when the normal methods of engagement are no longer available meant adapting our approach. Our Responsible Business team had to be agile, flexible and quick to re-shape its strategy.

In addition, as the first sponsor of the Games, we started with a blank canvass in terms of assessing how to measure our impact. We then evolved and realigned our reporting methods to fit the scheme rolled-out as more sponsors came on board. An important part of the project was that it enabled us to clearly value the contribution we have made to our wider community through Games engagement.

Georgina: I think those in the team before I joined might agree that pivoting to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic was indeed a major challenge – as I imagine it would have been to all aspects of the Games.

I also think that choosing which organisations and initiatives to support proved challenging. There are so many worthy causes but, in the end, our support is channelled into the areas where we can achieve the greatest impact.

What are some of the key outcomes we’ve achieved?

Georgina: Overall, we have contributed £1 million+ in social value as part of the Games.

Some of our key highlights in numbers are:

• 1,000 hours spent on community projects
• 450 hours spent on schools engagement
• 700 hours of D&I support (delivered by the D&I team)
• Over £500,000 donated to local charities by the Gowling WLG Charitable Trust
• 3,000 hours of free legal advice to charities and community groups
• Over 120 wellbeing sessions (again, delivered by the D&I team)

Building on these successes, what are you looking to do more of?

Ruth: As a firm we benefitted hugely, and continue to do so, from collaborating with organisations aligned with our values; and who we met or formed close ties with during this time. When it comes to meaningful social value, it is very much a case of us being greater than the sum of our parts, and I look forward to building on the relationships we developed and strengthened through the Games to help deliver even more social value.   

Georgina: I think the Games gave our existing responsible business strategies a massive boost: it certainly increased people’s interest in delivering social value, volunteering and generally ‘doing good’. We continue to build on that.

It also helped us evolve our thinking on our community programmes: for instance, we had not really worked with social enterprises before, but the Games led us to do that. And we continue to apply a lens of continuous development and improvement to ensure that our responsible business programmes remain fresh and – importantly – impactful for the organisations we support.

There must be many highlights from your time on the Games. Is there one you can share from a social value perspective?

Ruth: Can I have two? Firstly, that we were able to place Shah Begum, a paralegal from our Dispute Resolution Group, on secondment into B2022’s legacy team and then its legacy charity: United by 2022. Shah’s secondment has enabled us to add value to our client relationships. Also, that we were able to support the legacy of B2022 through sponsorship of Perry’s Party Picnic at the Birmingham Festival 23.

Georgina: My favourite (light-hearted) social value highlight has to be attending a fun day organised by Ladywood Community Project (one of the five organisations we supported with a financial donation) with Perry the Bull! Seeing the excitement of the local children when he made his appearance was just fantastic! He got everyone dancing the conga, held a running race with the children and handed versions of himself out as raffle prizes – it was just brilliant to see the Games in action in the community!

What were the key takeaways for you from being involved in the Games?

Ruth: I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of working with so many great colleagues across the firm. It really did epitomise all of our values and demonstrated how key they are to our success. I also learnt that impactful social value for an organisation is about choosing the strategy that aligns with your values and available resources.

Georgina: Sounds like a cliché but I think a real sense of teamwork. The Games were one of those rare times when we all came together and worked, or volunteered, with folk we wouldn’t usually work with. And that’s the benefit of volunteering in general – when you work with people in a different context, or with people you’ve never worked with before, you get the opportunity to connect and learn about each other in a different way. Not only is this valuable for the firm, it’s also hugely rewarding on a personal level and enriches our working lives.