Our Values: Being a Social business

C.A.R.P. Collaborations operates as a business with social aims embedded in 3 guiding principles:

‘We seek to build community capacity and community cohesion. We believe that social inclusion and participation can only be achieved through effective collaborative working with different communities, third sector organisations, local and national government and with crucial input from community member involvement. We do this through undertaking community development, innovative research, evidence-based training and policy advice.’

Our 3 guiding principles of social inclusion, participation and collaboration are interdependent upon each other.

Social inclusion

Our business goal is to further social inclusion. We believe that together we are stronger, which requires celebrating differences and working to individual’s strengths. Everybody can be included, we all have skills and attributes we can bring to the table

Participation

We can only further social inclusion through people’s sustained participation. This means we actively work to increase involvement not just in an activity or task, but by enabling each other to share opinions and decision making processes.

Collaboration

We believe that the best outcomes are achieved through pooling the expertise that different organisations and individuals have. We therefore work in positive collaboration with partner organisations, funders and project participants to create social change and mutual understanding through shared knowledge.

Our Values: Being a cooperative

C.A.R.P. Collaborations is a workers’ cooperative and all staff have an equal part in decision making and the same salary; making us equally employees, employers, and directors.

All our business operations are based upon the global Cooperative movement’s 9 shared values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, solidarity, honesty, openness, social responsibility and care for others. We also have an ‘asset lock’ which means any profit we generate stays within the business and is used to fund innovation in line with our social aims.

We believe that organisations must work for their employees as much as employees work for their organisation and we strive to ensure that we bring an innovative and flexible approach to all of our work practices.