learnpurple corporate social responsibility


We want to ensure that our responsibilities are taken beyond 'the norm' and extend this to all stakeholders. In line with our values, we care, and therefore only employ and partner with people who also care. We’ve always wanted to ‘give back’ and make the world a better place – after all our company purpose is ‘transformation’.

Community Work

Everyone at the Purple Palace is encouraged to take part in community activity and are allowed paid time off for this. This allows us to devote time to a number of activities, including:

  • Offering free facilitation, training and conference speakers to a selection of charities including Springboard (helps young, unemployed and disadvantaged people into a sustainable career in the hospitality, leisure and tourism industries), The Samaritans, The Brokerage (working in partnership with City employers to create a pathway to the City for young residents of London’s inner-city boroughs), HIT Scotland and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Foundation where we worked with the apprentices in his Fifteen restaurants.
  • Speaking at a number of universities and colleges in the UK as well as dedicating time for mentoring students – our CEO is a visiting fellow at two universities.
  • Chairing the Acorn Scholarship which aims to seek out talented individuals within the catering, leisure, hospitality and tourism industries and help them realise their ambitions and reward their determination
  • Training as industry ambassadors and then working with young people in the community
  • Members of, and contribute where appropriate to, the Talent Foundation who are concerned with the promotion of development for all

As well as offering good discounts for charities, we also donate learning and development vouchers as scholarships, incentives, awards and prizes for charities who set out to improve the prospects of all types of people.

  • Our CEO, Jane Sunley, makes available a lot of her time for external activities. She holds two charitable non-executive directorships, is current president of HR in Hospitality, a life patron of Springboard and advises a number of start-up businesses. In the past she’s been instrumental in the success of a number of community initiatives including: a £5m regeneration programme for  Bethnal Green City , Butler’s Whart Chef School, Getting London Working (a £7m project to help the hard to place and disadvantaged into work) as well as lots of experience working with the hard to place via agencies such as Job Club for the Deaf, various hostels and New Deal.

Environmental Policy

Being environmentally friendly is also key to our business. We’ve harnessed technology to be as paperless as possible and if we need to use paper, it’s recycled. We’ve banned all printing out of emails and encourage people to walk or take public transport to meetings if appropriate. If flights are unavoidable, we carbon neutralise them.

Stakeholders

We encourage a healthy and honest lifestyle; therefore there’s always fresh fruit in our kitchen along with healthy drinks, and everyone has a subsidy on gym membership. Our in-office masseur visits once a month (of course this is a fully clothed activity!) There are talks from top nutritionists and health experts as well. Because we all focus and work hard, our ‘Ministry of Fun’ has a monthly allocation to spend on treats – such as team lunches. There are always drinks in the office on Fridays – not totally PC but we like it (and everything is in moderation). We also really know how to throw a party, some years we take the entire team away for a trip – Ibiza was memorable...!

We have an open information policy so that all have access to financial and other information if they’d like it.

Through our mentoring scheme, team members have access to expert support on an ongoing basis and know they can come to us with any issue, work related or otherwise and we will help them.

We treat all our people, suppliers and partners with respect, and in many cases bringing them into the business as if they were employees. We also pay them on 30 days maximum credit – sooner if we can.

We also support our suppliers and partners. We helped our IT outsource to expand its own team by providing advice, motivation and the 'how to's' as well as agreeing a guaranteed income structure to negate the risk to them and also assisted a young in-house design team to start their own design business.