The Power of Purpose: Building a Social Enterprise with Cecilia Crossley

Neil Morrison: Welcome to another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast brought to you by Staffbase. My name is Neil Morrison and I’m the Chief people officer at Staffbase. Today, I’m joined by someone who I greatly admire, Cecilia Crossley. Beyond being a great human, Cecilia is founder of the social enterprise From Babies with Love, is the host on How HR Leaders Change The World Podcast and platform and is a genuine changemaker who champions the same spirit in individuals and others from within some of the worlds largest organizations. Cecilia, welcome to the podcast.

Cecilia Crossley: Thank you so much, Neil. What an incredibly kind introduction. Ditto, back at you. I’m really honored to be here. I love talking to you, and I’m looking forward to this conversation. Thank you.

Neil Morrison: Great, and actually that’s a good point. Maybe we start there that this is in someways switching places because I’ve had the pleasure to be hosted on your podcast for a while but now we get to turn the tables and I get to pick your brains which I am really excited about. So Cecilia, let’s start with From Babies with Love.

I’d love to hear more about it as a social enterprise, founded very deliberately that way, channeling all of the profits that you make towards orphaned and abandoned children. Tell me where did the concept come from? How did you turn that into a very real reality?

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, thank you. It’s a little bit life story, if I’m honest. Formative years, fire in the belly stuff. So I hope that’s okay for me to share it that way. From Babies with Love believes that every child should be safe, loved, and learning and as you say donates a hundred percent of its profits to help achieve that vision.

Why was I motivated to create a social enterprise to do that? My dad is English and my mum is Brazilian and every few years we take our family holiday to go and see my grandmother and my cousins and so on in Brazil. And it meant that when I was growing up, as a child myself I used to see children living on the streets of Rio.

So I think deep down in me I’ve always had an awareness of gross inequality. I grew up with it and I think it’s wrong. I don’t see why it is the case. Why on earth do we organize our society like that, it doesn’t make any sense to me. As well as my mother’s influence in who I’ve become, in terms of the different cultures I’ve been exposed to, and different societies, my dad is a political history lecturer, or he was. He’s retired now, and he always used to school me in thinking and ways of organizing society that perhaps, you don’t necessarily get taught in a free market 101 economics module and what he instilled in me perhaps was questioning the status quo and fairness and justice as aspirational goals for how the world should be.

I think those two influences are that deep down formative stuff on why I became very interested in the concept of social enterprise. Which is really simply, without a techie term like social enterprise, to me, what it means is, how do we harness the power of business to prevent and solve the world’s biggest problems? You can look at statistics, they’re slightly different in different countries around the world, but say public sector spend represents, somewhere between 20 to 40 something, let’s say, spend of a percentage of GDP and philanthropy might be about three on average around the world. Wherever you look, business is the largest portion of commerce, of trade, of our energy, of our 9:00 to 5:00, of our effort.

And so to me, in terms of how we allocate that energy and effort, time, capital, resource, that seems the smartest place to play. Or at least alongside government or multilateral organizations’ efforts, an untapped place to play in terms of creating the world we all want to thrive in. I look at that opportunity against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which, they’re sometimes called the UN Global Goals or the world’s to-do list, the world’s purpose statements, the world’s strategy documents.

I think, well, this is a really exciting opportunity to put us on a new trajectory to achieving those goals, we are woefully behind as you might guess. And I think social enterprise, all this concept of how do we harness the power of business, is just a very exciting space. Following a traditional grad program, beginning of my career at KPMG and professional services, I trained to become an accountant, I moved into international development in finance roles in the NGO world. That’s where I learned more about the language of social enterprise, the idea of social impact. And this was before any business had a purpose and how wonderful that most businesses now or lots of certainly large businesses do have a purpose. You can see movement in this space happening slowly but surely.

Along that journey, I became a parent and in a very cliched fashion on a very traditional maternity leave had the idea to create my own social enterprise, From Babies with Love. In becoming a parent I’d had the experience of sitting at home on sofa in a dressing gown, sleep deprived, hormones, chemicals, a little one in my arms, all of that, and one of the big children’s charity adverts came on TV, their Christmas appeal. I don’t even remember in the fog of it all if it was like UNICEF or Save the Children perhaps, but we can all imagine one of those adverts. My emotional reaction to that was profound.

I was truly naive into knowing how I would connect with the tragedy of the situation that advert was showing. And I’m somebody who cared about adverts like that anyway, already, given my family background and my career, the turn my career had taken. Yes, I was moved, I was crying, I was just in bits, I was just sobbing. Everybody I’ve spoken to since about that experience nods their heads and some people say, “Yes, I can’t even watch the news anymore,” or, “I can’t watch the dog charity advert,” or even like, “The fairy washing up liquid advert sets me off these days.” It’s something that I don’t understand the science of it, but it’s chemical and it’s hormonal and it is universal in us as humans that in becoming a parent our own children are our priority and that concern for the welfare of children everywhere goes to a deeper place.

There are psychologists and sociologists that properly understand that but that’s fine I know intrinsically that it’s true. And that feeling stayed with me and was with me when I was in a children’s shop buying a gift for a friend having a baby and I picked up, again I don’t remember in the sleep deprivation phase but like a little onesie or a t-shirt and I thought, “Huh what if I could buy this gift for somebody I care about I’m going to spend my money on anyway but what if it could also help a vulnerable child wouldn’t that be great it would speak to those emotions I experienced and make me feel good?” let alone anything altruistic I just be like, “Yay I’m the super thoughtful gift giver I’m a really nice person.” I know that the person I’m giving it to would also connect with that positive story of empowering a less fortunate child.

But then there was one other thought that I had, which took me back to those early days at KPMG, and a behavior that I think all I know was happening all across the business world. And I saw an opportunity to do something very simple but very clever. I don’t mean that in a grandiose fashion, like so simple, but just ”low hanging fruit” kind of clever. 

I remember in the early noughties, I was in Canary Wharf, in the time of running around for the Blackberry, remember those days? That was what life was like. Bar one, all my bosses were male. The agenda for diversity was rising up in discussions and the business case for it was being quantified by the big consultancies in terms of correlating diverse leadership, gender balance boards with profitability. Initiatives led by HR professionals to achieve goals, to ensure gender diverse and other facets of diversity at senior leadership were being put in place.

And in respect of women in senior leadership and on boards, family-friendly workplaces is a key driver of whether any working parent, and at the time that, historically speaking, that meant working mothers, would stay in their careers and thrive and continue to those co-C-suite positions. And there was something happening in a parental leave experience that was a wasted opportunity. And this is how we came up with the idea for From Babies With Love.

It was a bunch of flowers being sent by an EA or maybe a line manager or not, depending on who the EA or line manager was, and probably depending whether it was a woman taking mat leave. And a bunch of flowers is well intended, but it’s gone after 10 days. It’s like, “10-day-old baby, 10-day-old bunch of flowers. Aah, can only keep one alive.” And I thought this is an ad hoc, inconsistent, unstrategic, and totally uninclusive £50, €50, $50 being spent and lost on all these miscellaneous credit cards. What other employee communication is treated like that?

The answer is, there’s none. This just hadn’t been thought about. So all we did was we created a parental leave gift service, a strategic values-led, impact-led communication. “Dear Cecilia, many congratulations on the arrival of your baby. This gift for you is also empowering a vulnerable child. Best wishes, Chief People Officer, and all your friends at….”

At each touch point, you’ve got heartfelt meaning, you’ve got impact, you’ve got tone from the top leadership, you’ve got “This is us as a company, this is what we stand for.” None of that, you just happen to have an EA that’s thought about it. As a tool in a process held by HR alongside all the other tools in their toolbox to achieve those talent-retention and knock-on gender balance goals, inclusively for all working parents, no matter it being mat leave, pat leave, adoption leave, surrogacy leave, no matter who’s taking the parental leave, they are acknowledged and celebrated and they will continue their thriving career at their employer as a working parent.

And at the same time, cherry on the cake, you’re helping another child. The most memorable, meaningful, timely, pertinent, poignant, heartfelt communication that can be sent to a colleague. All with that £50 that was being spent on a bunch of flowers. So that is how we began. I hope you like the story.

Neil Morrison: Amazing story. There’s so many highlights in there, you know, not least one to skirt over around maybe all the best ideas are the simple ones. But it takes someone to spot the gap and to solve the problem. And I think you and the team of From Babies with Love are doing just that.

But also, it makes me think, wow, what almost an amalgamation of formative experiences, values that you’d learned, new parental experiences, and the shake and shock of that time and then this sort of professional reflections through it. But it still took you to say, “And I’m going to make a change, and I’m going to start this, and we’re going to try and do it.” I think that’s where maybe lots of people wouldn’t take that next step, and you did. And I’m curious to know, in those early days somewhat going against the grain in solving this problem, a social enterprise being set up, what were some of those early challenges in terms of cutting through and getting the message out there?

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, that’s a great question. Thank you. I’ve been trained as a risk-averse auditor so you can imagine me moving into an entrepreneurial mindset. It was just so scary. And how I dealt with that was starting in the most — in the smallest way you could possibly imagine. I didn’t quit my job. 

I was head of finance for an NGO. I somehow had the energy to go to work, go home, put my now eldest son to bed. And then technology, a laptop, and Wi-Fi, and e-commerce actually enabled me to get going in a very — in a company like Staffbase, you would call it the beta phase, I think, of testing out this concept, putting it out to market and seeing who it reached through some very simple communications and what the response was.

I did start in a very small and simple on my sofa in the evening way. The barriers to testing it, the barriers to entry were really quite manageable. So initially, we started with some traditional PR work to see if we could get some media coverage because one of the barriers or the hurdles was that I had no budget for any kind of sophisticated marketing and communications, nor did I have the expertise.

I literally started from a zero knowledge base of how do you create a sales funnel? How do you win your first client? How do you make sure you’re solving a problem for your customer and landing and resonating with them? I literally started from scratch in many facets of the business, but that was one of them. People used to say to me, “Oh, but you’re an accountant, that must have just sorted you out on setting up a business.” I’m like, “Well, that’s one element of it, but there are so many others I had to learn from scratch.” The way that we did communicate was traditional PR and getting editorial coverage, which I did by moving in networks that were motivated to share stories of social enterprise, to amplify the model of how business can affect change and solve social and environmental problems, and some great coverage, some great storytelling came from that.

The funniest one I can share with you is my father-in-law picked up the phone to me. He’s from Yorkshire, which is in the north of England, and he likes rugby. That might paint a picture for some of our listeners of a big, strapping Yorkshire man. One that you would not imagine would read Hello! Magazine, which is one of these, celeb magazines. It’s a bit, you’re just reading nonsense, really. It’s one of those. He picked up the phone to me and said, “Cecilia, you’re in Hello! Magazine, giving a gift to —” he was then Prince Charles. I was, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was going to happen, but also why are you reading Hello! Magazine?”

Once I’d gone over the shock of my father-in-law’s behavior, I rushed out to buy it. And through these networks, I’d had the opportunity to present the business model to Prince Charles with his work on the role of business in society. And Prince George had just been born, so I took the opportunity to give him a gift. You never know whose hands that might end up in. Knowing full well it may have just ended up in a cupboard with lots of other gifts, but worth a shot. Sure enough, it got syndicated by one of the photography syndications, I’d been papped. This story was in Hello! Magazine, and I had no idea that was going to happen.

So what that taught me was, it was all about the story. It was all about the emotional connection that’s in that, in that you can feel good about yourself when you choose to make a purchase, whatever that is, that embedded in it does good in the world, that that purpose is so evident and connects with your heart.

I think the emotional element of what it means to you personally is our USP in all that we do. One of our advantages in our model is it’s so easy for us to tell that story, and it resonates. And that’s why we were getting that kind of success with that communication channel and that coverage. So that is really how we got going and overcame that hurdle of no money and no knowledge.

Neil Morrison: Yes, but at the same time stumbling upon that insight around the human connection around storytelling and actually creating awareness, or actual experiences that untap the emotion that’s associated to doing good by giving. I suppose, then on the back of that, working with lots of organizations to try and get them to buy in, and to get them to replace the €50, or $50, or £50 worth of flowers with a gift from From Babies with Love.

And in many ways, I think the concept of social impact, social enterprise really appeals at an individual level. But then when you’re working with organizations, and you’re having to bring that new thinking in to how they might do things, I’m really curious, have there been times working with some of those bigger companies where you’ve really realized the impact of effective communications in driving this approach, incorporating this social impact aspect into that into their process?

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, there are so many examples of that that I could share with you from different perspectives and in different mechanisms. One, for example, one client, a new client this year, in fact, wanted to partner with us because a colleague had included the fact that they didn’t receive a gift in a tribunal case. And I had actually never thought about it from that perspective.

I thought about the fact that one person gets a bunch of flowers, the person in the team next door thinks, “Oh, well, I didn’t get anything. Now I feel rubbish,” because it was a lack of consistency in communication. Something well intended for one, actually the net effect across the whole was detrimental. As I say, that’s only one case I’ve ever heard of it being referenced in a tribunal.

But there’s actually a risk element too. What happens when you don’t communicate to all in a fair and equitable way. So I thought that was really interesting. As I say I hadn’t thought about how that other person feels and I do say that when I say, “Do you realize at the moment your process is really inconsistent and ad hoc and how does that make the people that left out feel,” but there we go there was actually a really serious consequence in addition to even if you didn’t consider how those people left out feel is a serious consequence there was a tribunal at the end of it, so there was that. The other aspects coming at it from the positive benefits of heartfelt communication, the feedback that comes through to the chief people officer.

In the early days, we would get the executive assistants of the CHROs saying to us, occasionally emailing, my team and I saying, “Oh my gosh, my inbox is just full of the most lovely emails of thanks and appreciation.” Not only in that they are being acknowledged at this really important moment in their life and therefore their employee journey but also knowing that how they feel knowing that their company is also helping another child. That all would be coming in in terms of internal feedback from our clients to their C-suite. Amazing.

Another example would be, of their own choice and authentically therein the employees going on to social platforms and saying how much they love it, how much they love, again, those two things. I love that my employer is celebrating this moment in my life and I am valued as a working parent and I love that it’s having a positive effect in society. And sometimes those are literally money-can’t-buy communications because sometimes we’d have the employer branding team or the talent attraction team coming through to say the employer experience team that we might work with saying, “Oh how much did you pay for that post? Can we have some more? Can we build the program?” We’d be like, “There is no program, nobody paid anything.” That is a genuine communication and your employees being advocates of your values in action. In particular, on LinkedIn I love it because on LinkedIn so much might be like new report or something like that and it’s like “Okay, lovely new report.” 

These posts would be the employee voice maybe with a baby photo or of the little gift like oh it’s a little onesie and a blanket those kind of things. And you can imagine that’s a bit different on LinkedIn so the ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, and the algorithm loves it and off it goes. I think that’s another piece of evidence that shows meaning embedded in communication just, yes it just resonates and these are the results.

And then we’ve also had some examples where clients have chosen to do an internal piece of communication, say on their intranet, to showcase the partnership. Some photographs of the children that together we’re empowering, some short stories about the change in their lives, some short pieces of employers’ perspectives and how they felt in receiving their gift. You can put all that together into a really lovely article.

And on several occasions, we’ve had partners saying that those articles were, in terms of the metrics of the comms, the most reach and the most engaged, the most comments in a comment thread, for example, of a measure of engagement that they have ever had. These are some global companies that I’m talking about here. So you can imagine how happy that feedback makes us to know how it resonates and how powerful the story is. Yes, those are some of the examples we hear feedback from our clients.

Neil Morrison: Yes, it’s great. Thanks for sharing those it’s also good to hear that even social enterprise serving the needs of vulnerable children is also still a slave to the LinkedIn algorithm.

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, it certainly is. For sure.

Neil Morrison: But it’s true. The problem is simple, then the opportunity is really obvious in terms of value for the people to work with From Babies with Love and untap that value internally. I think the other clever thing that you’ve done is you’ve always really kept the UN sustainable goals or the world’s to-do list, I love that expression, front and center, and then this human truth, which is why the posts or the comms get so much engagement. Those three things together, I think, is really where the power and the impact sit.

That also means it is a diverse audience that you’re communicating to. The employee, the beneficiary, the organizations in the middle, the corporations, shareholders. How and what started as this cottage industry side hustle that’s really grown into something far bigger, maybe than you even thought at one point. How do you ensure that the messaging resonates equally or equally where it’s needed with all of those sort of stakeholders?

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, so for the recipients of the gifts, there are touch points, physical touch points in communication throughout their experience of receiving and resonating with the story. They go from even the design of the gift that they’re receiving. Our collections are called things like Kindness is Magic, and those words are, on top of a rainbow on a little print on a onesie. In every single place that we are communicating with the gift recipient we think about the values and the impact and we express it even through design. 

Things like swing tickets like where the barcode would be on a product in a shop or in the back of a box or what have you, the story is there just short just a couple of sentences. Things like in the card the handwritten greetings card that the colleague receives, the impact is embedded in the message. On the back of the card where there normally might be a bit of blurb, once again there’s the message. There’s repetition happening, but because it’s in the product itself, like through the design, every time that onesie comes out of the washing machine and because it’s touched the hearts the employee, the gift recipient, is remembering.

I think the place that we spend the majority of our time communicating and engaging with people for them to feel their own sense of pride and it’s them that is driving the impact by choosing to work with us. It’s really the people in the corporate companies that are making the decisions to work with us. Then, other people in the HR team, whoever it is in an HR function that looks after a parental leave process, they’re the ones instructing us daily, dispatch, dispatch, dispatch as their parental leave has come through.

And I think it’s that community that have — it’s not only the HR profession, it is other stakeholders in large corporates, for example, procurement teams, sustainability teams, marketing teams, internal comms teams, they are all stakeholders to the partnership in terms of what the outputs of it are and how those help them achieve their objectives. And we want them to take the ownership that they are the change makers. We would achieve nothing if they didn’t choose us as a supplier.

To me, that’s a bit of magic there in terms of our role as communicators is to encourage others to feel part of a network of professionals who with just this one initiative are changing the world. We support 46,000 children now across all our partners. It’s a big number. I’m very proud of it. You can imagine how much more work there is to do. Then beyond that, I feel we have a role in encouraging those people to realize there’s so many other things that they can do through their work, through the power of commerce, no matter what their business does, to affect change.

And I think it’s encouraging them to just take a moment to think about the purpose of their business, but what connects with their heart, you could call that a personal purpose and where are the connections? Because that’s what creates the space in anybody’s to-do list, no matter their annual objectives, or no matter the business’s purpose and therefore their role and their annual objectives and quarterly work plan, and what they’re doing on a Tuesday between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM, to do the most rewarding work. I think it’s as simple as that.

At the same time, it’s delivering commercially whatever they need to do for the bottom line, crude numbers, dollar signs at the end of it that they are accountable for, but also do that in a way that is also contributing to the UN Global Goals. I really enjoy that role of how we communicate with everybody that we work with.

Neil Morrison: Really well said. When you listed off some of those internal stakeholders marketing, comms, sustainability, HR, much like when you or your father-in-law saw that sort of free coverage in that sense, within Hello! Magazine, when you hear about those employee-led, authentic voices, storytelling via LinkedIn or what have you, that’s also gold dust for those stakeholders internally. We know that people don’t engage as much with the message top-down that companies share about their values or their strategy around ESG, but when one of their employees takes to a platform and shares it and what it means to them, suddenly, maybe the algorithm likes that one as well, but suddenly the coverage becomes far more genuine, far more authentic, far more believable and really cuts through. In that sense we often talk to some of our customers about really building reputation from the inside out.

If you can create a space where your employees are putting their voice to the strategic initiatives, then we’ve really, really started to cut through, and you’ll see that value. Thanks for sharing those thoughts, Cecilia. The concept of gift giving with purpose is obviously really central to From Babies with Love. But has there been times when communicating that has been more challenging, where there’s been more resistance or reluctance, where you’ve had to work harder to find the new channel in? I’d love to hear how you then balance the commercial objectives with that social impact message.

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, it’s such a great question, because sometimes people say to me things like, “Oh, you must just sell really easily, everyone must just love what you do.” I’m like, “Yes, everybody does love what we do. But we get told no, all the time.” People are like, “Really? Who says no to you and what you’re doing?” I’m like, “Yes, people say no, all the time.” So why is that? It’s just the pressures of people feeling constraints, from time to set something up to budgets. It’s not that people don’t love it.

So we absolutely have to navigate the normal, know, like, and trust, the normal, clear articulation of business case, tangible ROI kind of challenges that anybody trying to sell something has to be able to do. We are not different to that. We are not a nice-to-have — we’re not philanthropic. We’re helping HR engage and retain their working parents. That’s a commercial objective. They have a commercial target to achieve and they have to apply the resource they’ve got to do that in the smartest way. So we absolutely have to communicate that we are one of the smartest ways.

We absolutely do that implicitly through impact being at the core. But when I’m meeting, say, a new potential client and saying, “Here’s how we could help you solve that problem, with your attrition of your working parents, and in particular working women.” I start with their problem and how we solve it. I don’t actually start — In fact, as we’ve done in this conversation today, I haven’t yet shared with you the story of one of the children. I’ve explained that that is the core of the model and the feeling that we create in terms of employee experience through communication is the core. But I haven’t gone into lots of detail on that. So you see, I’m doing it even now.

I’m thinking about what does the person I’m communicating to want? What will make them feel great? And how do I create a win for everybody involved in this? I think that’s something that is essential to our model. The stakeholders in the company, all the ones we just discussed there, they all have a win. We’re contributing to all of their goals. The person that’s the decision maker is the chief people officer or the HR director. They absolutely need the win. We and the children get the win because we help more and we change their lives. And the employee, the resulting gift recipient gets the win as well. But I absolutely start with that

commercial, “This is why you should include this in your toolkit for your family-friendly workplace because you have a commercial objective and a commercial challenge you’re trying to solve.” And I just think that’s normal business practice. And we are a social enterprise. We’re not doing a bake sale in a foyer with all respect for the role of those. When I said at the beginning, you’ve got this much public sector spend this much philanthropy, and this much business. That’s the place we play. Therefore, we have to start with that commercial nous of how you go about partnering with any large corporate and becoming a supplier to them.

Neil Morrison: You’ve spoken to that space to play in with business and the value to help organizations unlock with your solution. You’ve spoken about HR need the win or the CHRO is the decision-maker. I suppose that, in some way, has led you to expand the reach of just the gift giving. How HR Leaders Change The World has also become connected in some way. Can you tell us how the two connected, or when one informed the other, and what that has meant for How HR Leaders Change The World as a platform, as a communications podcast?

Cecilia Crossley: Yes, I love how this evolved because I think the opportunities here have expanded my mind and my ambition. As we started serving so many global HR functions, I found myself all day talking to HR professionals, lots of your peers and getting to know you as well, Neil. In listening to the HR profession talk, because I’m not an HR professional myself, I haven’t come from that training and that work experience. I come from international development and finance and a totally different perspective. My lens into the profession was, “Well, look at all these other things that you’re doing. Do you realize that this, your green pension is achieving, is contributing to sustainable development goal 12, 13 and 14. This wellbeing program that you’ve got here, that’s contributing to sustainable development goal 3. And this inclusion objective you’ve got, well, that’s got SDG 5 written all over it,” and on and on I go.

I was connecting the dots, it was so obvious to me. But I realized that, well, I felt like I’m the only one in the whole world that’s connecting the dots. And initially, I did feel quite shy in saying what I now say out loud and advocate for and have built a platform for, because I would call the entire HR profession,I call them all HR change makers. And I probably perhaps, actually — I don’t think I am anymore. When I first thought that, I think I was the only person in the world that used that phrase. Then two things happened that made me think, HR is doing so much work that’s driving positive social and environmental change in a highly commercial environment, that there must be a conversation happening about this. Where in thought leadership environments for the profession, is this conversation happening? Let me see how I can contribute. Let me see how I can bring all the pioneering HR professionals I already know doing all this work to that conversation. So I looked for it about three years ago. Just desk space, big old Google search, searching on types of phrases and language, and I couldn’t find it.

I found one article, it was from Mercer, so all credit to Mercer. It was only one article. It was titled something like, “How HR delivers the S in ESG.” I thought, “Right, there’s only one article, and they’ve left out the E and the G.” And I laughed. I thought, “Okay, again, I saw a gap, a low-hanging fruit opportunity.” And I thought, “We could be useful here. We can add value for the profession by creating a platform that amplifies all the different work that HR does, that’s delivering its objectives, delivering those commercial goals, but at the same time is creating positive change because that doesn’t seem to exist at the moment for the profession.”

And I felt like we should do it because we already had developed a network of really pioneering HR people and we saw the gap. That is how we created the How HR Leaders Change the World podcast. And you can go from employer value proposition, to talent attraction, to employee experience, to learning and development, to total rewards or comp and bends. There are so many initiatives, any partnership with From Babies With Love is one small example of how HR leaders change the world. There are so many more.

And it’s just been fantastic, because I think that broader way of convening the profession, it ignites lots of change that is over and above the change we create. That immediate change we create for the children in our partnerships, it’s expanded it to, yes, plant seeds of change that are happening all over the world now across all sorts of different companies. Why has that landed so well? I think it’s because of two things. The first is the transformation of the HR profession itself, which we are just blowing in the wind off, long gone is the personnel department of the 1980s. Fast forwarded by the pandemic, for sure, we now have a profession of commercially savvy business leaders driving social value through their work. That trend, I think, sits within an even bigger trend of the role of business in society.

15 years ago, 20 years ago, no business had a purpose, that slowly but surely timeframes. But now we find most medium and large-sized businesses do and they’re now doing the work of how do we embed purpose so that it’s not just a page on our website, it’s actually showing up in the work of every single employee every single day. And who leads the systems that do that? How we’re motivated by work, how we are educated in our work and how we’re held accountable for the work we do? It’s HR, it’s the people functions so it’s really exciting.

I suppose the other place that all of that has led us to expand is lots of our partners saying, “Cecilia we love the communication you create, how you make our employees feel through their parental leave journey. Can you do the same for all our new joiners as well?” We currently spend all this money on merch and it’s just merch but actually if we embed impact and communicate a message to say a new grad cohort or anybody that’s joining that their welcome is infused with meaning and feeling and values and impact exactly the same thing happens in terms of that communication being heartfelt, getting the post on social, all the things we described happened again.

And that’s fantastic because it means what we’ve expanded into is creating those employee communications led by impact and values across 10 moments in the employee journey from onboarding to retirement. So what we’ve expanded to is this community of HR changemakers that with us and with all sorts of other suppliers from a board of trustees of a pension provider to their medical insurance benefits, say including menopause or including surrogacy. I could go on and on and on here and I won’t. But there are so many examples. So it’s expanded into so much more and more to come I think. There are many more children that we want to be safe, loved, and learning so onwards we go.

Neil Morrison: Wow, and maybe, what a brilliant place to finish. Onwards we go. You had said that you haven’t started with a story about one of the children. Maybe to finish, tell us. Make that real for us in terms of impact.

Cecilia Crossley: Oh, thank you. And I actually already have a lump in my throat just thinking of doing that. Let me give two examples that have made headlines across the world that therefore will perhaps feel familiar to anybody listening. The first is children in Afghanistan who we’d been working on contributing to a program run by Street Child one of our partner charities in Afghanistan prior to the withdrawal of the allied forces. Of course, when they withdrew the situation got a lot worse in particular for girls in Afghanistan who are excluded from education. What chance does anybody have in their life if they can’t read, write, add up and take away? How will anybody fight for their rights if they can’t do those four things?

So we are working on children’s education, primary education, which — sometimes it takes place children sat around a little circle under a tree where it’s too difficult to be in a school as we would think of a classroom. So community learning spaces where children can learn and the teachers are quite often in danger. It slightly depends on the exchange rate so this is a more or less circa number but it costs £96 a year to educate a child in Afghanistan. That is it.

So you can imagine the kind of — when we’re serving so many global companies with tens of thousands of gifts how quickly we can impact a child because actually just from the purchasing power parity of the economy in different countries where the world’s toughest places for children that means that’s the kind of impact we can create.

Another would be what happened recently in the invasion of the Ukraine. Our partners, another of our partners, SOS Children’s Villages would share with us stories such as young children, primary school-age children again being put on a bus from Eastern Ukraine with the phone number of an auntie perhaps or a cousin or something in say Western Ukraine maybe Lviv or maybe in Romania or Poland or just put on a bus and put on a train saying, “Please go to safety.” Those young children just sent — just trying to get them to safety and so programs actually with both of our partners Streetyard and SOS Children to have social workers at the train stations and the bus stations to meet those children to give them a hug, a juice and a biscuit, and yes make them less scared.

Child-friendly spaces being established in the West to try to reunify those children with their extended family no matter where they are. Identification and reunification are the first two things you always want a child to be with their own biological family, be it a grandparent or an aunt or what have you. If they can’t, then creating a family environment to help them grow up safe, loved, and learning. We work in conflict zones with those charity partners to do the best we can to make that happen. You can hear the crack in my voice because they are hard stories to tell. 

Neil Morrison: Yes, and because it matters, and it’s full circle to where the motivation came from. To set out on a journey to be a change-maker and to find a solution and to create this value and to unlock that social impact is one thing, but then to hear the stories about how you and the team have been able to achieve just that and in the same breath, from always talking to you, this always feels like just the beginning. So much more impact to make through partnerships all over the world. So tell people how they can find out more if they’re a change maker wanting to say yes to From Babies with Love. How can they find out more? Then equally, how can people tune into the How HR Leaders Change The World Podcast?

Cecilia Crossley: Oh, thank you so much, Neil. It’s so kind of you to invite me to say to everybody please come and join us. It is the most rewarding simplest quick win low-hanging fruit work. It’s possible to do wherever you are. We serve globally and we can absolutely add value to your employee experience, your communications internally and externally through impact-led, heartfelt work. Our website is frombabieswithlove.org. Have a look at all the different services and those different moments that matter in your employee journey and pick one to start with. It will be a small simple win and we’ll get it going and grow from there. 

And then if you’re interested in the role of the HR profession in the impact of business you can find How HR Leaders Change The World wherever you get your podcasts and perhaps now we could put a link in the show note too to wherever everybody’s finding Aspire to Inspire and listening to this. It will be in the same place. And if I could ask for your help in sharing it with one of your HR colleagues we’d love that because I hope that they will find it a source of inspiration and knowledge sharing. We’ve featured Neil, as we’ve shared before, but we also have a whole library of CHROs from all over the world sharing their examples of success, how they’re doing it in their companies, and their visions for the future. And you may never know your own CHRO at the place you work may already be in the alumni of the podcast, so please do take a look.

Neil Morrison: Thanks, Cecilia. Thank you for swapping seats. You’re usually the one asking the questions but this has been a real gift to hear the story of and the mission of From Babies with Love, and all of the impact associated to that enterprise as well as How HR Leaders Change The World. Thank you for joining us on the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. I hope everyone has enjoyed listening, and be sure to tune in for more episodes in the future. Thank you.

Cecilia Crossley: Thank you, Neil.