Social Enterprise

At Five Rivers, we believe you can serve social issues better when you’re free of the responsibility of answering to external investors and their potential conflicting interests.

Five Rivers is a Certified Member of Social Enterprise UK.

As a social enterprise we are recognised as a company “primarily driven by social objectives and whose surplus is reinvested in to the organisation or community rather than creating profit.” (Social Enterprise UK.)

At Five Rivers, we reinvest a percentage of our surplus with the sole aim of achieving the best outcomes for the children and young people in our care. This includes a significant investment in our research and training programmes, practice development teams and human resources.

We ask our suppliers to sign up to our social compact:

• When requested, suppliers are asked to provide a meaningful work experience for our young people in care. This would mean giving them job opportunities not just making cups of tea, but helping them learn about different job roles, how to feel valued as an employee, giving them meaningful instruction that will help them get a job in the future.
• The second request for suppliers is that they offer meaningful interview experiences for care leavers who apply for jobs with them, (not just from Five Rivers) where they may not have the qualifications, but have other life experience that makes them suitable characters, who’ve learned through their experiences to work hard, show tenacity, have integrity, have good interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.

As a social enterprise to ask all individuals in Five Rivers to do the following:

1. Buy from local independent retailers where possible helping support our local communities, creating an environment that’s positive for care leavers and for children and young people in care.
2. To help support local community enterprises, charities, voluntary groups, to help build better communities where we can. this may be through providing resources such as meeting room spaces, helping with management or training decision’s, or other variety of ways that this may help improve local community resources.
3. We ask all individuals to take the opportunity to promote a better understanding of children and young people in care.

For the environment:

1. We ask the organisation continues to monitor how it can improve its contribution to managing the harm to the environment by reducing our carbon footprint. We have a three yearly audit, ESOS, which tells us how we are doing.
2. In addition we are carrying out an annual audit of our social value an environmental footprint.
3. We ask all individuals to work with us to at home and at work reduce their carbon footprint for the good of children and young people in the future.

Our research and development programme is continuing to build knowledge around the effective assessment of need and its treatment. One example is a research partnership with the Anna Freud Centre in London, seeking to validate an attachment measure for children under 10 years, and to develop a new video-based interactive assessment for adolescents.