A year of action (Update 2005 )
This is the BBC's corporate social responsibility update. Last year, we published a comprehensive account of activities and performance in line with our own definition of what CSR means for a publicly funded, public service media organization. Here we are bringing you, in review format, fresh stories and insights into how the BBC is living its commitment to corporate citizenship and to delivering public value through its services to audiences.
We are in the midst of making complex changes to the way the BBC operates to help deliver savings we need to invest in the digital future. This process has inevitably put pressure on everyone who works here. But what this review highlights is the undiminished commitment of our staff to deliver on the BBC's aspiration to enrich the lives of communities in the UK and around the world.
This CSR review for 2005 reflects what is already being done. Our challenge is to use the opportunities of new technologies and a more creative, open BBC to build on this work over the years ahead.
LEARNING
The stories of ordinary people who led extraordinary lives during the Second World War have been archived for the nation through BBC Learning's ambitious online and community project WW2 People's War.
Launched on Remembrance Day 2003, the initiative has captured thousands of authentic stories and photographs of people who experienced life on the home front and the front lines, before it's too late.
Phase One of the project helped contributors to submit their stories to the People's War website at bbc.co.uk/ww2 by establishing a network of associate centres, where mostly elderly people without access to IT equipment could get help in using the internet.
Phase two was launched in April this year with broadcast journalists working across BBC nations and regions to showcase content already contributed and encourage more people to take part. Community Service Volunteers helped recruit volunteer story gatherers, trained to work across the UK . Schools have also been encouraged to take part and the 60th anniversaries to commemorate the end of WW2 provided a key focus for the work.
The outreach scheme is now in its final phase, aiming to ensure that everyone wanting to contribute a story to the site can do so, and that the BBC's partners have the support they need.
In 2004 an interim feedback report on the project (Hugh Hope Stone Associates) identified many positive outcomes, including enabling older people to leave a legacy, raising self esteem, building relationships between generations and between the BBC and its community partners. In 2005, greater collaboration with BBC nations & regions helped raise the project's profile for a key local radio audience and resulted in a significant amount of related content in local output.
Meanwhile, hundreds of events organised by the BBC's partners, ranged from exhibitions of wartime food to the MOD's WW2 celebration at St James's Park in London, which attracted 90,000 people and added many more stories to the BBC collection.
The People's War archive will remain accessible to the public for years to come, both on the BBC website and partner sites.
The British Library and Arts Histories Database Service are currently considering proposals for long-term co-hosting of the material.
Statistics tell just some of the story
The BBC developed a partnership code during the year, in consultation with around 700 organisations from the public, private and voluntary sectors.
The code, along with information and support for organisations wanting to develop formal partnerships with the BBC, can be found at bbc.co.uk/partnerships
To help programme makers understand the potential benefits and risks involved in partnering outside organisations, the BBC has developed a new intranet guide to establishing, managing and developing partnerships, as well as ending them.
Storylines in soaps like EastEnders, a special Test the Nation on language, pub quizzes online and thousands of community partners helped launch the BBC's biggest ever literacy campaign in October, targeting the estimated 12 million adults who struggle with everyday reading and writing.
With its emphasis on informal learning, the three-year RaW (Read and Write) campaign aims to tap into people's interests and passions – including around World Cup 2006 – to inspire them to take the first steps towards improved literacy. Online self-assessment, celebrity recommended reading, special output across the radio networks and free personalised telephone coaching are all part of the RaW package.
In the first two weeks of the £2m campaign, 500,000 people visited the RaW website at bbc.co.uk/raw and 5,240 RaW centres – including 88 percent of UK libraries, community centres, pubs and clubs – have signed up to deliver RaW activities like quizzes, online sessions and printed RaW resources. World Book Day in March will be the next key programme focus.
CITIZENSHIP
Over four weeks this autumn, Radio 4's Today programme mounted an experiment to find out if citizens can solve the problems that politicians can't.
Working with the University of Newcastle , the programme recruited 24 randomly selected residents of Reading to sit as a citizens' jury, deliberate on the broad issue of respect – ahead of the expected White Paper on that agenda – and come up with recommendations for local and national governments.
They met for two and a half hours twice a week, defined what concerns mattered to them, took evidence from experts whom they cross-examined, and voted on which recommendations to send forward. An oversight panel monitored selection of jurors and the fairness of the process throughout.
The jury's deliberations were reported weekly on air and followed in depth on the Radio 4 website. Its conclusions were put to the leader of Reading Borough Council David Sutton and Home Office minister Hazel Blears, both of whom agreed to meet the jurors to discuss their recommendations, which included changes to ASBO regulation, better mentoring of teenagers in schools and more resources to house Reading's homeless.
Today's political reporter Polly Billington, who led the experiment, admits the jury is still out on whether the Reading experiment was effective in influencing political outcomes. For their part, many of the jurors intend to carry on researching their findings and pressing for change. Today will follow their progress and return to individual jury members when issues they raised are addressed in mainstream politics.
bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/politics/citizen
DISABILITY
On air and in-house, the BBC has promised to do better on disability representation. Its biggest ever disability forum began a new debate.
I can't think of a more important organisation in this country that doesn't deal exclusively with disability issues that has got to get this right.'
That expectation from Geoff Armstrong, chief executive of the National Disability Arts Forum, set the tone of an unprecedented meeting in October between top BBC decision makers and representatives of 24 key disability organisations.
The Disability Leaders seminar aimed to open a fresh dialogue on portrayal, recruitment and how technology can improve access. It was set against the background of the BBC's acknowledged unsatisfactory performance, on and off air: in 2003-4, representation of disability in peak time TV was less than one percent, while 2.7 percent of our staff disclosed a disability, compared with 10.1 percent of the UK population. And it followed the introduction of targets for the portrayal of disability in TV output, a target for disabled staff of four percent by 2007 and the launch in April of a new BBC diversity strategy. Opening the debate, Caroline Thomson, director of strategy, said we needed to move away from the old belief that ‘Auntie knows best': ‘It is often more appropriate for us to work in partnership – to listen harder and deliver more.'
Over the last year, the BBC has delivered a number of programmes that placed disabled characters at the heart of mainstream drama and comedy as well as documenting disability issues and celebrating achievement.
Actor Paul Henshall, who has cerebral palsy, played regular character Dean West – a student doctor with the same disability – in BBC One's Holby City and starred in the BBC Three comedy pilot I'm With Stupid. Afterlife star Paula Sage, who has Down's Syndrome, appeared in BBC Scotland soap River City and the latest series of children's drama Grange Hill introduced deaf actress Rebecca-Anne Whithey as new character Holly Parsons.
Sunday Grandstand covered the first Paralympic World Cup from Manchester in May and BBC Two's Beyond Boundaries charted the remarkable stories of 11 physically disabled people as they attempted to trek 220 miles across Nicaragua . The series built its audience to two million and registered an exceptionally high audience appreciation of 87 percent (BBC Pulse survey).
Radio 4 specials included Peter White's Sony award-winning series Blind Man's Beauty and paraplegic writer Andrew McLay's dramatisation of his own story in Watch The Spider. The success of BBC Asian Network drama Silver Street in challenging misinformation around mental illness was recognised when it beat ITV1's Heartbeat and BBC One's Doctors to win the soap prize in the 2005 Mental Health in the Media awards. And online, campaigning website Ouch! covered hundreds of disability issues, from deaf/blind travel to non-PC disabled stand-ups.
But as an array of speakers and lobbyists told the seminar, there was still much to do in building awareness among programme makers and commissioners. Where was the issue of dyslexia, which affects six million people, in the BBC schedules? Why, when current affairs TV programmes have captioned interviews in foreign languages, are they not voiced over for sight-impaired viewers? The BBC's 10 percent target for audio description by 2008 was commendable, but why shouldn't it be 20 percent? Why could the BBC not follow the example of Israeli television in employing a news presenter with a facial disfigurement? And why did programmes medicalise disability instead of looking at disabled people as citizens, often living full lives?
BBC disability affairs specialist and radio presenter Peter White, who is blind, argued the case for specialist content (as carried in output like See Hear, Radio 4's You and Yours and White's own In Touch programme) alongside inclusion of disability in the mainstream: ‘I don't want to be treated like everyone else, I want to be treated differently, according to my differences,' he said.
Graham Ellis, radio and music's controller, programming groups, agreed that if there was a strong call from the disability community for specialised radio programmes that went beyond In Touch, the BBC would consider that.
White also felt that the key to representative programming was to recruit more disabled people across the BBC: ‘Journalists and reporters are almost as unrepresentative as they have always been – young, healthy and rather macho!'
Under its new diversity strategy, the BBC aimed to make disability much more than an HR issue, explained director of BBC people Stephen Dando. The new approach was to place disability at the heart of the BBC's business by making the link between creativity and insight within the workforce and our ability to engage all UK audiences. A publicity campaign, featuring profiles of disabled BBC staff, was launched in April with the aim of encouraging more people with disabilities to apply for BBC jobs. But Dando acknowledged that there had been little progress in the last year towards the four percent target, at a time when the BBC was shedding posts.
From Nick Tanton, principal R&D engineer, the seminar heard about BBC involvement in coming access technologies that would allow, for instance, provision of a spoken electronic programme guide (EPG). Closed signing via broadband was also being investigated. For Ashley Highfield, director of new media, consistency in delivery would be key: ‘We need to do a lot more on working out how to make spoken guides available on satellite, cable, freeview and the internet,' he said.
Director of television Jana Bennett questioned whether the BBC tried hard enough to get a wide spectrum of society into entertainment programmes – in finding contestants for game shows, for instance. And why not use big TV vehicles like Watchdog and Panorama to specialise in journalism around disability, in the way that You and Yours does on radio?
Bennett welcomed portrayal targets but also the ambition, within the new diversity strategy, to improve understanding of disability among programme producers. ‘We need to go beyond this level of discussion now, giving confidence and knowledge to our producers and researchers so they are inspired to do things they would otherwise not think of doing.
We want to get it right more often.'
A follow up seminar is planned for 2006 to allow senior managers to review the BBC's progress against targets and to maintain the dialogue with disability groups.
In consultation with the Broadcasting and Creative Industries Disability Network (BCIDN), Radio Times has developed a new web-based listings service for disabled viewers and listeners. Within the next few months, users will be able to search for all programmes on all channels that offer audio description, sign language and sub-titles. ‘This is a small step but we think a very important one,' said BCIDN chairman David Kogan.
In the first half of the year, all the BBC's main channels exceeded their Ofcom targets for providing subtitling, audio description (AD) and signing. BBC Three more than doubled its AD quota under the code on television access services; with only the CBBC channel dipping slightly (one percent) below its target for subtitling. The BBC remains the only broadcaster committed to 100 percent subtitling by 2008.
The BBC partnered Channel 4 and The Actors Centres to launch the Talent Fund for Disabled Actors – a bursary scheme designed to increase the pool of disabled acting talent available to TV casting directors. Through auditions in London , Newcastle and Manchester , 25 actors were selected to attend BBC masterclasses, given by leading TV directors, and Actors Centre training. As a direct result, actor Mark McCubbin, who is lame, won the part of a psychiatrist in ITV's new Trial and Retribution drama. All the actors have been helped to develop their professional portfolios and a DVD compilation of their work has been distributed across the industry. A number have since auditioned for TV parts and others were invited to meet the BBC comedy team at a special session in London .
Targets set in 2004 for the portrayal of disabled people on TV included:
• a regular disabled character in a returning BBC One drama
• two disabled extras out of every hundred across all BBC One drama
• three top entertainment shows on the main channels to feature a minimum of one disabled contestant in 50
• one BBC Three entertainment or drama series with a regular disabled character.
There is no formal monitoring system, although some progress has been made against these targets in the last year. Coming in 2006 are Magnificent 7, a single BBC Two drama about a family of autistic children; Soundproof, a deaf thriller, also for BBC Two; and a BBC Three series of I'm With Stupid – commissioned via the BBC Comedy North talent scheme. Portrayal targets will be reviewed annually.
The first ever business benchmarking exercise on disability for the public and private sector scored the BBC significantly higher (90 percent) than the average (57 percent) of 80 UK organisations taking part. The results from the Employers Forum on Disability found that the BBC was most successful in working to ensure disability equality in areas like training, promotion, workplace design and employee support. Development of equality goals in marketing was singled out as a future priority.
Working with computing and disability charity AbilityNet, the BBC has launched the My Web, My Way website, giving advice on how people can customise their computers to make the most of the internet, whether they're able-bodied or disabled. Visit bbc.co.uk/accessibility/
COMMUNITY
When Olympic 400 metre champion Michael Johnson shared a
platform with 24-year old single mother Natasha Burleigh at the BBC's national sport summit in March, it was the culmination of three months' intense work to explore
solutions to some of the major challenges facing sport in the UK . Johnson was just one of the elite athletes who lent support to BBC Sport's 13 regional summits, which brought together a wide range of sport leaders, participants and enthusiasts. Burleigh's own story, of how a local sports project restored her self esteem after drugs and depression wrecked her life, was an inspirational reminder of the power of sport at grass roots level.
The summits were organised with Sport England, UK Sport, SportScotland and the Sports Councils for Wales and Northern Ireland and designed to be calls to action rather than talking shops. They produced not just ideas, but pledges to be fulfilled by set dates and ranged from developing one accreditation that would allow volunteers to work with young people in all sports, to village sports days and investigating tax breaks for cyclists.
Trevor Smith of the Youth Sport Trust pledged to ask the producers of all British soaps to include more sport and sporting venues in plot lines. BBC Sport itself has undertaken to train members of sports governing bodies in handling the media.
Ideas and action plans generated have been fed back to government and key sporting
bodies. Sport minister Richard Caborn has already praised the summits' success in informing decision makers.
Of the 700 delegates who attended, 97 percent said they would come to another summit, 75 percent pledged to take action and 85 percent said they had met new people who shared their agenda.
As part of its aim to use partnerships to maximise the public value of its sports rights, BBC Sport is examining ways to take the initiative forward, including Olympic summits.
Radio stoke gave 350 TEENAGERS AT 16 schools the chance to create more than 30 hours of original programming through the station's Making Waves story telling and media literacy project.
Working with a producer over five weeks, students have learned about news-gathering, audiences, editorial decisions, recording and editing. Over the last 18 months, themes covered in features broadcast across Radio Stoke's mainstream programmes have included bullying, stereotypes, crime, sexuality, racism, phobias and bingo. Online content has been carried on the local Where I Live site.
‘This is very different material that we would normally miss, from a different audience with plenty to say,' explains executive producer Sarah Harness.
Material produced is being used across local schools in citizenship lessons and teachers report increased confidence and career aspiration among the young people taking part, Harness says.
A sister project, Inside Lives, has taught Stoke's older listeners to write, record and broadcast their own stories. Twenty are played each month and some of the best were heard on Radio 4's Pick of the Week and BBC 7. Inside Lives resumes in 2006.
Digital urban music station 1Xtra offers work experience to a different young person every week of the year as part of its aim to attract talent from groups who might not think the BBC is for them. Great if you live in London , but what about Leeds, Bristol or Cardiff ? They were just three stops on the station's six-city autumn tour, where the team staged day-long workshops in production, music mixing, presentation, interviewing and online production. Content produced by the students was played in the breakfast show and feedback from the trainees has been ‘enthusiastic', says executive producer Jane Morris.
Truanting is an issue that affects many schools, but what if it were teachers, not pupils, bunking off? The hilarious consequences of just that scenario was the theme of a film made by 14-15 year olds from Peckham whose work was screened at a BBC film festival in May, concluding a year-long training scheme at three city academies.
Programme makers from DEC, nations and regions, plus the BBC's training division and CSR team pooled resources to train 36 students and teachers from London (Peckham and Willesden) and Middlesbrough to shoot and edit short films, using loaned Sony DV cameras and AVID software. The resulting four-minute films, taking in drama, music montage and news reports, were screened at the May festival, where trainees also met experienced TV film makers.
Students are now passing on their skills within their own and other local schools.
Over three days in August a BBC Wales production team shot a 15-minute film in Cardiff that the Barnardos Cymru organisation will use to spearhead an awareness campaign about the largely hidden exploitation of young people through prostitution.
Written and produced by Damian George and directed by Phil Higginson, the drama was performed by students from the Welsh College of Music and Drama and professional actors, with post production and editing completed at BBC Cardiff.
Cast, crew, and the entire production team were volunteers and much of the work was done in their own time. For George, an operations co-ordinator with some TV writing experience, and Higginson, who usually directs promos, the voluntary scheme was a rare opportunity to make a drama.
BBC Wales is now talking to the RNLI – another of the 13 voluntary organisations which it partners – about making an information video for schools on the institute's work.
volunteers
Television, radio and online have inspired mass audiences to take action, with some dramatic outcomes in 2005.
August's week long DoNation season, highlighting the critical issue of organ donation, ran across all media and was directly responsible for adding 100,000 extra names to the organ donor register - 12 times the average weekly UK registration. During the week, seven million viewers tuned into the first ever Casualty at Holby City interactive episode where the audience decided which of two patients should receive a transplant – 100,000 voting for the conclusion of the drama. The website achieved almost half a million hits.
This autumn, an on-air and online partnership between Radio 2 and TimeBank has prompted thousands of new volunteers to sign up to give time in their community. Within four weeks of the Time 2 Share campaign launching in October, almost 2400 had registered their details on the Radio 2 website at bbc.co.uk/radio2/time2share or by freephone 0800 022 022 - their areas of interest and post code passed to the TimeBank charity to match with local volunteering opportunities.
A thousand volunteered in the first week - as many as TimeBank expects when ten campaigns are running at once.
In June, the BBC Action Network website established itself as a portal to the world of volunteering during national Volunteers' Week. With direct promotion from the BBC homepage, hits to the site more than trebled during the week. Online stories ranged from volunteers helping women trafficked into the sex industry to rural toad wardens, and helped connect up to 80,000 users a day to more than 20 specialist partner organisations, including the database do-it.org.uk.
Volunteers from BBC Entertainment in Manchester have used two of the best known programme formats to create imaginative off-air events, make a difference to local young people and get closer to a variety of audiences.
After a young autistic contestant had real impact on an edition of Junior Mastermind, the producers had the idea of taking the famous black chair out to the Pictor School in Cheshire , attended by children with autism and Asperger's Syndrome, to allow other children who find it hard to communicate to shine at their specialist subject. A 12 year old boy who chose Harry Potter as his speciality beat David Blunkett's broadcast performance on the same subject.
The children who took part, answering questions voiced specially by John Humphrys, were recorded and went away with edited tapes of their performance, complete with music and buzzer. After positive feedback from teachers, the team hopes to repeat the exercise with other special schools. Insights gained by the programme makers helped them get the best out of a young contestant with Asperger's in a subsequent series, says Caroline Roberts, the show's executive producer. Six hundred people called a special advice line on Asperger's after that programme went out.
Roberts is also the exec behind collaboration between Question of Sport, Lancashire County Cricket Club and Manchester schools and business which allowed students from schools with ‘aim higher' status to have professional coaching and to learn to edit films the BBC team recorded of their experience. The best reviews of the coaching day were published on the QoS website and the winners and their classmates invited to a recording of the programme. Separately, an off-air charity Question of Sport helped support Sport Relief and the cricket project has inspired a new collaboration with Manchester City FC.
• More than 3000 people have volunteered through the staff scheme Connecting with Communities since it began in 2003.
Jane Mote is forever in the future and never forgets the past: ‘You only get one life,' she says, ‘why do anything that is half hearted?' The former creator and executive editor of BBC London is off, out of the BBC, for three weeks to Uganda next month to help establish the Ugandan Arts and Media Academy, a skills development initiative for young Africans, with a former trainee recruit that she brought to the BBC nearly five years ago as part of her own diversity development programme for the new service.
‘I like to see the whole thing through - you can't be dispassionate. You've got to keep the momentum for change going,' she argues.
For the last three years, Jane has been the enigmatic and energetic controller of the Community Channel, taking it from obscurity to serious partnership and measurable delivery with the weight of the BBC, Sky, Pact, The Home Office, ITV, Channel 4 and others signing up to back Jane's mission to make community television compelling.
Now at the end of a BBC career that started in 1989 in BBC Wales, Jane leaves with a track record affirmed across the voluntary sector and the TV industry as the woman who brought sparkle and passion to what others called worthy but dull. Her success is rooted in undeniable strengths - utterly personable, always approachable, committed, self effacing yet robustly strong minded, on the side of the weak, supporting the disconnected, ever professional, forever the visionary, never despondent. To be sorely missed.
Michael Hastings
Head of BBC corporate social responsibility
Environment
Springwatch was broadcast in 2005 on BBC Two, showing the advance of spring using sightings and wildlife from around the UK and focusing on iconic spring species, including courting grebes, boxing hares and spawning toads.
But this was more than a one-off conservation programme. It has sparked a series of mass audience participation activities around the conservation of landscape and wildlife. And under the wider multi-media campaign called ‘Breathing Space', the long term goal is to mobilise a million people to significantly increase the UK 's wildlife-friendly green spaces and heighten awareness and understanding of nature – literally create breathing spaces for people and wildlife.
To engage this amount of people requires a sustained, cross-platform approach – joined up messages across TV, radio and the internet. Through the Springwatch Survey 2005 on bbc.co.uk, audiences could directly participate in a national mapping survey and access further information and message boards. The survey itself showed that climate change factors were already influencing the UK :
• bumblebees and butterflies were being seen three weeks earlier than 30 years ago;
• hawthorn bushes flowered about two and a half weeks earlier than they did 30 years ago;
• swifts arrived about a week earlier this year than in recent warm years;
• one species of bumblebee is raising an extra generation due to milder winters.
There were also a range of associated programmes, including Spring Trilogy, Birdsong
Guide, Living World and a Woman's Hour special on how weather affects wildlife, all on Radio 4. The BBC's Video Nation scheme allowed people to contribute by producing their own ‘breathing space' videos which can be viewed on the Video Nation website. On the ground, these activities were supported by a range of partner organisations – from wildlife trusts to local authorities, the Big Lottery Fund to local businesses.
The Breathing Space campaign will continue into 2006 with Autumnwatch and other programmes including Dirty Weekend (BBC One 2007), Nature of Britain (BBC One 2007) and Greatest Garden (BBC One and Two, 2008). Further audience engagement initiatives will be developed around climate change in early 2006 and an international conservation fund raising campaign in 2007.
News & Current Affairs 168 items 71 items
Children's 7 items 5 items
Radio 96 items 68 items
Online news 292 items 123 items
by David Shukman, environment and science correspondent, BBC News
Environmentalists sometimes accuse us of not taking climate change seriously enough while sceptics say we accept the warnings of global warming too unquestioningly. Both views can seem rather unfair when you're in the teeth of a howling gale on the Greenland ice-sheet trying to report on the latest findings of a team of NASA scientists.
To my knowledge no other news organisation has devoted anything like the same effort to grappling with the frontline realities of climate change science. From a research plane recording the melting of the Antarctic ice to a mountaintop post in Hawaii monitoring the rise in greenhouse gases, I have encountered the same relieved response from scientists: ‘Thank you for bothering – nobody else does.'
In my own experience, BBC News is prepared to dig deep to bring viewers closer to the climate change story. In July 2004, BBC News24 commissioned reports from as far afield as Alaska and the Gobi desert as part of a special Global Warning week. In the same way, the Ten O'Clock News has now agreed to send me to the farthest corners of the planet to report on the latest research. And this is part of a pattern. Numbers never tell you the whole story but an internal study in June 2005 found that over the previous year many BBC programmes were now covering climate change twice as often.
From Look North to Jeremy Vine to the BBC news website, editors are clearly sensing the subject's growing importance. When new data revealed that the Arctic ice was vanishing at an accelerating rate, the Ten O'Clock News chose it to lead that night's bulletin. But the recognition stretches more broadly as well: the fact that programmes like Springwatch, Blue Peter, Working Lunch and Gardener's World have also covered climate change illustrates how it touches all our lives.
Are we doing enough? No one in my shoes would ever think so. Like with any long-running story, hooks and bursts of activity are needed to catch an editor's eye and all of us regularly engaged on this topic would like to see more of it on air.
We have to tread carefully though. Catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina can be all too readily blamed on global warming and then our task is to explain what the science can answer and what it cannot.
Whatever the verdict, climate change is moving up the agenda and for many of us there are busy times ahead.
How We Performed
Progress has been made on the key BBC Environmental performance indicators. The waste indicators show real improvement in terms of increasing the proportions of recycled waste (up to 31%, just below and ambitious target of 32% in 2004) and reducing total waste produced (to 262 kgs per person, exceeding our target). Total CO2 emissions reduced significantly in 2004 (to 0.174 tonnes per broadcast hour) – reflecting approximately 95% of all electricity used at the BBC being sourced from Climate Change Levy exempt sources such as hydroelectric power stations, wind farms and gas from landfill sites. Transport CO 2 emissions increased over 2004, to 1,210 kgs per person) reflecting international priorities. Measures have been introduced to increase efficiency of vehicles and travel which should result in a decrease over the longer term. Full information is available at bbc.co.uk/info/environment.
giving
by Sally Deighan, chief executive,
BBC Children in Need
BBC Children in Need. What is it? To most people it is one night of television which raises lots of money, and oh… it has a yellow bear with an eye bandage as its mascot. That's the answer most members of the public would give and, in truth, so would a large number of BBC staff.
Taking up my post as chief executive last year with a brief to modernise and develop BBC Children in Need for the future was, on first inspection, a daunting task but an exciting challenge. After all, this is a charity owned by the BBC, which has enjoyed 25 years of unrivalled success and growth.
Pudsey is one of Britain 's most recognised and cherished brands and the programme is one of the most viewed Friday nights of television across the year. With such a success rate you could argue – ‘if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
However, hand in hand with the rise in the success of the charity, has been a rise in the need that exists among children and young people across the UK . Last year, the appeal raised a record £34.1 million. We had requests from projects for more than five times that amount – a staggering £175m.
So, the need looms as large as ever:
• Nearly 1000 children aged 5-7 provide 50 or more hours of care to siblings or parents every week
• 15,000 children aged 16 and under are forced to leave home by their parents each year – they are known as ‘the thrown away children'
• Every day at least one young man aged 15-24 commits suicide in the UK
• It costs on average three times per year more to bring up a child with disabilities compared to an able bodied child.
Through the collective efforts of BBC programme makers, staff, fundraisers, volunteers, corporate supporters and the thousands of pledge donations, a lot has been done to alleviate the suffering of some of these children and young people. But imagine how much more effective we could be if we tried to eradicate some of the need in the first place? That is the next part of our journey.
It is the intention of the Trustees and myself that the BBC Children in Need organisation will develop into more than just an effective grant maker. It should also become an organisation that will do its own bit to help provoke change and play a real part in resolving the underlying causes of need. So how are we going to do this? Well, to begin with, the charity will soon be starting to form dynamic relationships with other charities who share the same vision. We will exchange ideas and create joint initiatives and strategies that will aim to create lasting change.
From a broadcasting perspective, we need the BBC to strengthen its resolve to raise awareness as to the issues facing children and young people in the UK today. I will be asking programme makers to continue to bring to life the experiences of these young people and to raise their efforts into provoking debate, exploring the causes behind the issues.
All children deserve to reach their full potential. In partnership with others, BBC Children in Need aims to make this a reality. The aim is ambitious, but we think it's a goal worth striving for.
To make a donation visit bbc.co.uk/Pudsey or call 0845 733 2233 (local call).
DJ Shai (Ali Boksh) from Newport , Wales is a self-starter. He has established himself as a club dj playing urban and dance music, set up his own company to promote and stage events and presents two weekend shows on a community radio station. Now he wants to create a mainstream radio show for 18-30 year olds, covering the dance/urban scene in Wales . He knows he needs to develop his presentation skills. That's where the £5000 in support he has just won through the BBC Urban Bursary Awards could help.
Ali was one of 17 candidates shortlisted from 150 nominees to attend a three-day workshop in Manchester . Nine others also received £5000 and the top seven were each awarded £10,000 – money allocated from the Fame Academy Bursary, set up in 2003 with £2.7m raised during the BBC One series.
The new urban award aimed to identify young people with talent and proven initiative, who would benefit from help to move on to the next level, but who were probably ‘below the BBC radar', explains Lorna Clarke, the BBC New Talent executive behind the scheme.
‘We weren't sure a BBC advert would draw in the people this is aimed at, so we relied instead on a national network of youth leaders, promoters and community music workers to act as nominators for candidates in their area.'
Almost 50 were interviewed and among the bursary winners were Capo (Chris Stennett), a London DVD producer whose award will buy training in camera skills and business planning; Otilla Ordog from Manchester, an artist manager and talent promoter who wants to learn about marketing; and Mayor (Daniel Evans), founder of his own hip-hop record label in Cardiff, who wants training in studio engineering.
‘It's not about the money,' says DJ Shai. ‘I couldn't buy the network of contacts that this experience has given me.'
• By the end of 2005, the Fame Academy Bursary will have spent £1.25m helping young music makers.
When your vision is ‘a just world, free from poverty', you need all the support you can get to achieve your ambitions.
In 2005, Comic Relief was backed by more than half the population – 59 percent got involved in raising money for the March appeal – and in its 20th year, and the 10th anniversary of Red Nose Day, the charity raised a record £65m. The appeal night audience peaked at 12.9m and 300 celebrities took part. More records fell on the night. A total of £4.5m was donated online in seven hours and £1.5m contributed via interactive television. And as with past appeals, every penny donated by the public has gone to help people around the world affected by poverty and social injustice. The operation costs money, but this is covered in a range of ingenious ways, including licence fees for Red Nose days and investment income.
Over the years Comic Relief has addressed difficult issues from the AIDS crisis in Africa to homelessness and domestic violence in the UK . This year was no different, when elder abuse was firmly on the agenda. Comic Relief played a key role in the Make Poverty History Campaign where one in three people under 35 in the UK wore the white band symbol and more than 1,250 music artists supported the cause. Nearly 3.8bn people tuned into the ten global Live8 concerts in July.
International
The day that BBC Breakfast reported live from Sher Moi Southlake primary school in Kenya, about its twinning relationship with St Matthew's School in Preston, 400 other UK schools signed up to twin with schools in Africa through BBC World Class. Three hundred more joined during that World Class Africa week in July via the BBC website at www.bbc.co.uk/worldclass, pushing the total number of twinned schools to 1720. The target had been 1000.
In a year when the eyes of the world were on Africa , the BBC used its World Class partnership project – part of the extensive Africa Lives on the BBC season– to help increase international understanding and challenge stereotypes by linking pupils and teachers across continents. It was a collaboration with expert twinning organisations like the British Council and internally, with output teams that included Radio Five Live, CBBC's Xchange, BBC 7's Big Toe children's radio show, BBC Four, BBC nations and regions, World Service and bbc.co.uk. The project has provided original content for audiences and inspired them to get involved. In turn, real stories about twinning schools have fed back into programmes. Big Toe alone generated 50 hours of live radio and online, the Bigger Picture created a post-card exchange between 12,000 children from twinned schools.
There have been mutual benefits. BBC Four's eight-part documentary series African School was filmed in Uganda with help from the education charity Link Community Development, one of World Class Africa's key partners. Since its association with World Class, enquiries to the charity have increased ten times.
The online guide to twinning makes clear that this is not about charity and fundraising but about what two schools can share in a learning partnership. As with a joint art project about reconciliation mounted by a Falls Road school in Belfast and its twinned school in South Africa , the relationship can be as much about what they have in common as what makes them different, explains World Class project leader Virginia Crompton.
The editorial legacy for the BBC is ongoing, she says. Plans include the Radio 4 Food Programme's international school dinners survey, using World Class, and links to BBC World Class African schools during BBC Three's coverage of next year's African Cup of Nations.
• Since the earthquake in Pakistan , World Class has been working with the British Council in Islamabad to twin 150 schools from the region with UK counterparts. Forty UK schools signed up within days of the project being featured on BBC Breakfast. The aim now is for more news programmes to use the World Class network of contacts and stories.
BBC Radio had been around for decades before it experimented with rolling news. Al Mirbad, the newest and only independent broadcaster in southern Iraq , had been on air just four months when it ditched its launch schedules to present virtually continuous coverage of October's historic referendum on the Iraqi constitution.
Journalists reported live from polling stations in Basra and other southern cities, while at the studio, the phone lines opened to allow ordinary Iraqis to have their say. That night, the fledgling TV service broadcast a special magazine programme, capturing and analysing the day's events. Broadcasting to a largely Shia audience, the station carried live studio debates in the run up to October 15, airing all shades of opinion. Perhaps more remarkable still is that many of Al Mirbad's 140 staff are young Iraqis who had never set foot in a studio before the eight-hour daily radio service launched in June. The TV channel followed in August with its nightly mix of locally produced news, sport, personality chat and music.
The £6.7m station is the biggest media reconstruction project ever mounted by the BBC's independent international charity, BBC World Service Trust. Funded by the Department for International Development, Al Mirbad is Iraqi run – the Trust providing only technical infrastructure, initial training and programming advice. The station team spans a range of local communities and nearly 20 percent are female, many of them front line presenters.
Project director Abir Awad doesn't underestimate the importance of local autonomy: ‘The team in Basra , and we at World Service Trust, take immense pride in the fact that this is an Iraqi station – built by Iraqis with Iraqi staff providing wholly Iraqi content to their community.'
And while formal audience research has still to be conducted, early feedback is very positive, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that the station already has a substantial following, Awad says.
Special seasons of programmes for Ramadan, also in October, were produced on radio and TV. Before the Iraqis go to the polls again in December, the Trust will provide tailored election coverage training for editors. ‘The station is building a reputation for holding the powerful to account,' says Richard Lucas, the Trust's senior consultant of the project. ‘The elections are bound to be its biggest test to date.'
Al Mirbad is funded until September 2006. Staff in Basra and at the World Service Trust are developing a business plan to attract further support from international and local sources.
Alongside the BBC's core mission to inform, educate and entertain, the organisation has pledged itself to be a responsible corporate citizen – acting in the public interest to strengthen and enrich communities across the UK and internationally.
We have formally defined that role as ‘living our values with integrity and ethical consistency towards our own people, our audiences, our business suppliers and the communities in which we operate'.
To co-ordinate that strategy, the BBC corporate social responsibility (CSR) team was set up in 2003 under Michael Hastings, reporting to Caroline Thomson, director of strategy. Mark Thompson chairs a CSR board which provides overall direction, more than 100 staff take part in regular forums to develop processes and best practice and a BBC governor takes special interest in CSR issues.
In addition, the BBC benchmarks its performance against other large organisations, for instance through Business in the Community's corporate responsibility index and environment index. We ranked 32nd and 61st respectively last year, and first among UK broadcasters.
• Contact the CSR team at MC4 C6, Media Centre, 201 Wood Lane , London W12 7TS . Email csrcentre@bbc.co.uk
useful Websites
BBC Action Network bbc.co.uk/actionnetwork
BBC Children in Need bbc.co.uk/pudsey
BBC Environment bbc.co.uk/info/environment/
BBC Partnerships bbc.co.uk/partnerships
BBC National Sport Summit bbc.co.uk/sportsummit/
Beyond Boundaries bbc.co.uk/ouch/tvradio/beyondboundaries/
Breathingspace bbc.co.uk/breathingspace
DoNation bbc.co.uk/donation
Fame Academy Bursary bbc.co.uk/newtalent/fameacademybursary/
Inside Lives bbc.co.uk/stoke/community_life/inside_lives/
Making Waves bbc.co.uk/stoke/making_waves/
My Web, My Way bbc.co.uk/accessibility
RaW (Read and Write) bbc.co.uk/raw
Springwatch bbc.co.uk/springwatch
Talent Fund for Disabled Actors bbc.co.uk/jobs/talentfund
Time 2 Share bbc.co.uk/radio2/timeshare
Video Nation bbc.co.uk/videonation/
World Class Africa bbc.co.uk/worldclass
WW2 People's War bbc.co.uk/ww2
Comic Relief www.comicrelief.org.uk
Community Channel www.communitychannel.org
Employers Forum on Disability www.employers-forum.co.uk
Radio Times Online www.radiotimes.com/