An Organisation's Story

University of Strathclyde Business School
David Hillier, Dean of the Business School

Organisations from all sectors, of all sizes, are joining MCR Pathways. They’re committed to transforming the education outcomes, career opportunities and life chances of care experienced young people.

Providing Mentoring support and delivering Talent Tasters doesn’t only hugely benefit our young people. It has a massive impact on our partners’ staff. Improving their confidence as well as further developing their leadership and communication skills:

“As part of our collaboration with MCR Pathways, I made the commitment that our Business School staff would become involved. My target is that 20% of our staff will get involved.

We’ve had a very good take-up. It’s not just great for what we’re doing for society, but it’s really impactful for our staff as well. Research has shown that the best leaders are those leaders who can empathise with people. The best way that you can really learn to empathise with people is to work with others. Working with others in a very non-judgemental way, and to understand and to empathise with individuals.

Getting our staff to work with young people, although it can be the most gratifying of engagements, it can also be the most challenging of engagements. Our staff, through the training that MCR Pathways gives them, will develop these leadership skills, which will put them in a great position for developing their own career as well. It’s very much a two-way approach. It’s what we can do for society, but also, by working with MCR Pathways, we’re actually able to really have an impactful staff development programme through this mentoring.

My interactions with MCR has left me in no doubt that this is an incredibly effective approach to allowing people to optimise their life, to achieve their ambitions and to go forward and make something of themselves. That affects their descendents as well. Impacting someone’s life now doesn’t just affect that individual, it affects their children, their grandchildren and you don’t know what impact it will have long-term. I’m fully behind this initiative.

By including this initiative into our ‘what we do’, I think it will have a really big impact on the productivity of the staff at Strathclyde Business School. And not just productivity, but the morale as well. It gives us something which is like an external sign of our institution, our universities, commitment to our local community. It’s part of our DNA. We’re a socially progressive institution. This is something that we can say is a very tangible sign, amongst all the other things that we’ve been doing, that our staff are living what we are saying we’re all about!

If I was to summarise our engagement with MCR Pathways is that it’s a ‘win win win’ for everyone. There’s a ‘win’ for the community and society. There’s a win for the individual. And there’s a ‘win’ for the staff and our organisation. You can always come up with negatives and challenges, but it’s what we want to do that’s important. We’re making a difference, we’re having an affect, we’re having an impact and we’re also improving the lives of young people and also our staff. For me, I’m very positive about the whole initiative.”