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Our community: Access to education
Why is community affairs important for Clifford Chance? We want every Clifford Chance office to engage with its local community, using its talents and resources to help others. This is crucial to our recruitment, retention and reputation. In line with our Principles and the skills we have to offer, we continue to focus on three themes across the firm: access to justice, finance and education.
Why does access to education matter to us?
Firstly, because we know what a difference education makes. We want the brightest children and students to progress into our own and other recruitment pools, without being held back by personal circumstances. So our programmes cover every stage of learning and development from primary school upwards; and while some initiatives are specific to legal education, most are more general. And, secondly, because you don’t need to be a lawyer to volunteer for our reading, numeracy and mentoring initiatives.
Meeting special needs in Dubai
Special Needs Families (SNF), the chosen charity of our Dubai office, supports families in the UAE. Its Support Centre is Dubai’s only day care centre for people over 18 with special needs, caring for members of some 150 families from Dubai, Sharjah and northern Emirates.
A panel of Clifford Chance business services professionals advises the Centre on issues such as grant funding, visa issues and marketing. They are currently helping the SNF board to apply for charitable status from the UAE Ministry of Social Affairs. Since March 2009, two Clifford Chance employees have been volunteering at the Centre each week.
A bridge to Oxbridge
Clifford Chance London supports the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF), which identifies bright, less-privileged school leavers and helps them progress to good universities and into top professions. The SMF takes a targeted approach, selecting the most able students who receive the Education Maintenance Allowance or free school meals. In addition to providing work experience, the firm organised an Oxbridge (the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) Interview Preparation Day for 30 SMF students from disadvantaged backgrounds. At least five received Oxbridge offers, with over 60% of students gaining offers at other leading universities.
Equipping Bangkok refugees to resettle
Clifford Chance Bangkok, through the Foundation, is helping the Bangkok Refugee Centre (BRC) to provide vital services to refugees, including education, healthcare and food. Following our donation, the BRC will now be able to fund further training and vocational courses, giving refugees the skills that make them more attractive to resettlement countries. Help is also being given to Asylum Access, a non-profit organisation which aims to protect refugee rights by providing free legal representation and advice.
Highlights of the year
- Mulberry Mulberry School for Girls is a community secondary school in Tower Hamlets, London. Clifford Chance’s Mentoring Programme for 14– and 15-year–olds at the school was established to help the students reach their goals for the future, and every month 30 volunteers from our London office take part in the programme. Since 2001, we have mentored more than 540 Mulberry students.
- 15 First-year law students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit from the international public interest fellowship programme created by Clifford Chance in partnership with Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington, DC each year.
Related links
(CMC) Lawyers and business services professionals in our Beijing office have given up four months of Saturdays to help Beijing’s migrant children. They were supporting CMC, a non-profit organisation helping children who flock from one city to another as their parents follow work opportunities. Fourteen volunteers took part in a CMC programme from March to June, helping to mentor and support a group of up to 150 migrant children every weekend. Foundation funds will be used over the coming months to help build a computer centre for CMC.
Our Düsseldorf, Frankfurt and Munich offices, after the initial donations were matched by donations from the partners, raised €29,400 for Santa Ana Children's Village in the Dominican Republic last year, which is run by the charity Unsere Kleinen Brüder und Schwestern (who kindly provided the images on the left and on the CR Homepage). The money is supporting a project that teaches children in the Village how to work their own plots of land, producing vegetables to feed the other orphans. In 2007 the offices donated €24,000 towards a bodega for storage of building materials on the grounds of the Village, and older children are now able to learn a trade in the adjacent workshop.