I'm on the Development Board for Oxfam and here to talk about this initiative called Work for Oxfam Day. I thought it might just help if I explain a bit about my involvement in charity and with Oxfam and then talk about this specific initiative.

As a business we give 10% of our profits to charity. We've set up a Foundation, of which I'm chair, so, currently I work directly with eighteen different charities, Oxfam being one of them. And, you know what? They're all great charities, they all do critical things that make a big difference. But I approach it with a businessman's brain, because I see every pound that is going out through the Foundation, for a charity you've got to try and get the best rate of return on that pound, like you would do in business. The only difference is the rate of return is measured in human betterment, not profit. So I always look and work out where we are getting the best results.

I can say this, I know of no other charity that gets more human betterment for every pound spent than Oxfam does.

I've just come back from a week in Bangladesh and I think when people talk about going on charity trips like this, you can tell that the person has had some sort of seminal moment, but I really did see the situation out there and the response that Oxfam has had. What I found interesting was that when I got out there, the first thing that was explained to me was that in the language of poverty a new phrase has had to be developed to make sense of just how poor some people are. So now there isn't just poor people, there's now a new class called the ultra poor, that's people on less than 60p a day.

I didn't think that was actually possible, and I think it's quite a weird indictment of our times that we have now to come up with new categorisations of people in such abject poverty.

So in Bangladesh you are dealing with people in the main on less than 60p a day. It's also the most populated country in the world, as well as being one of the poorest, which simply means there just isn't enough land for people to live on: the most basic, fundamental thing. As a response, people live on islands in the middle of rivers that get flooded each year with the monsoons. It's completely bonkers. I mean, why would you live on an island that's going to get washed away? The answer is because you just don't have an alternative.
What Oxfam does, is go out to these, probably what could arguably be the most disenfranchised communities in the world, and give them the intellectual capabilities to understand the situation that they are in, so that they can assess where the flood waters are coming, and when, and which huts are going to be affected first. And then as well as giving them the ability to think through their own problems and own them, Oxfam is there to give a finite amount of money, so that villagers can then decide what it is going to get spent on, which huts are going to get lifted above the floodwaters, who's going to get the goats and where's the toilet going to go?

I spent a week with these communities. The difference is immense, because it's the classic thing, they're not being given a handout, they're just being given a break. They're being given the ability to understand the wider world and how it is directly affecting them, and they're being given intellectual skills to solve those problems and a bit of cash to help them put it in. They were just transformed by the work that Oxfam had been doing, but they're doing it themselves, there's no handout culture, it's absolutely allowing these communities to solve their own problems. They're just guys who've been given the wrong end of the lollipop stick in life and Oxfam's there just giving them a little taste of the other end.

So, I'm a massive, massive fan and an advocate of Oxfam, and I can promise you this as one business person to another, there's no better pound you can spend on a charity than giving it to Oxfam.

So that's the why, why would you? The how is this thing called Work for Oxfam Day.

I don't know how you guys feel, but I think there's such an apathy about charity these days, there's charity fatigue ... we're inundated with requests for charity, and I'm nervous about where that's going to get us to, because it's a totally human response to get bored with something that's repeated. But the reality is that the situation is getting worse not better, so more than ever we need to find a way to get material amounts of money and invest them appropriately.

I found Work for Oxfam Day to be an absolutely transformational idea, because basically all you have to do as a business, is send out one email -and Oxfam by the way can do all the back office stuff - I just sent out one email to my team saying, “Today, do you fancy working for Oxfam?” What that means is you choose, just by clicking on the email, to either donate that day's salary, or half a day's or just the lunch hour. I pinged it around the building, 36% of people said yes to one of those three options. It raised over £5,000. To put that in context, that was on a Tuesday. The Friday before we'd done a Dress in Pink to raise money for Breast Cancer, done the big number in the business, got everyone to wear pink to raise money for charity. It raised £88. So that's the same group of people three days later, going from £88 to over £5,000. So it's transformative in its ability to raise money, super easy for the business to implement and for the employees to say yes to. And do you know what? It works for me as a business, because what I got is a huge amount of pride and engagement from the guys in the team. They felt properly engaged in it; they'd done something material, significant and different. So it was working for me as a business person in that respect. On the second point, I didn't lose anything. It's not like that volunteering scheme where you give up a day and people can go and work for a charity for a day. The great thing here is that people were doing a massive amount for charity, whilst sat at their desks helping me sell more smoothies.

It appealed to the absolute capitalist in me, and it appealed to the absolute altruist in me. So that's why it's just something I'd love you to consider. It's money going to a charity which is going to do transformational things for people, and it's something that has the potential to transform employee engagement in your own businesses.

So my pitch is: money for Oxfam and having your own Work for Oxfam Day.

Oxfam is also, by the way, just to make it a little bit competitive (which I quite like), going to be doing awards for the most generous company in the country, based on the response rate they get.

So right now, innocent, I am proud to say, is officially the most generous company in the country and I would love for someone to beat me. And for the company that does, I will give free smoothies to every single one of your employees. There's your incentive! Thanks very much.

For more information contact Anna Thorne athorne@oxfam.org.uk 01865 473775 or go to
www.oxfam.org.uk/workforoxfamday