Month: June 2022

By Dr Nik Kotecha OBE DL, Founder and Chairman of Morningside Pharmaceuticals 

Throughout my working life I’ve always been passionate about businesses giving-back to the communities they work in and serve through their corporate social responsibility endeavours.

In particular, I’m a firm believer that businesses and charities can benefit from each other, and I am an advocate of investing in CSR and ensuring my companies are good corporate citizens.

Businesses can help charities improve the skills of their people, and provide essential entrepreneurial and business knowledge to help them build their own sustainable income generating models.

Whereas charities offer businesses wider benefits associated with enhancing brand and engaging their people.

The Business-Charity Perspective

My company, Morningside Pharmaceuticals, has been investing in CSR for many years.

We have also, for more than three decades, been supplying a wide range of quality UK medicines via international Aid Organisations to the developing world. So I have seen first-hand the importance of Private and Third Sector collaborations to ensuring that people living in lower-middle income countries receive quality highly-regulated medicines.

For us, CSR is about the culture, ethos and identity of our business, which has been built around our mission of ‘making quality healthcare an affordable and accessible reality throughout the world.’ To this end we feel it’s important that our CSR activity lives and breathes our corporate values.

It’s also important that senior management teams lead on CSR activity and view it as part of a package connected to raising brand awareness, engagement of people, motivating employees and recruitment. These activities then feed into raising the whole image of the organisation and feed into KPIs, which will involve colleagues throughout the organisation.

Supporting charities also chimes with people’s personal values, which act as a motivating factor for a company’s employees, while making a positive contribution to society and the wider-world.

Another key area where charities add real value is recruitment of talent. People become aware of a business’ charitable activities and see those businesses as great places to work. This is particularly important in the East Midlands where there is a well publicised skills shortage, particularly in high level manufacturing.

Working with charities also involves people in a ‘common cause’ which is great for team building and bringing your people together under a shared mission.

So it’s clear supporting our communities makes very good business sense. 

A day to remember at Morningside as we came together to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee across our Loughborough HQ site.

Our priority was to re-create the street-party atmosphere, which thousands of people in the UK and Commonwealth will enjoy over the coming days.

There was bunting, balloons, and Union Jacks, as well as sandwiches and cupcakes, which were enjoyed by all.

Paying tribute to Her Majesty the Queen, our Chairman, Dr Nik Kotecha OBE DL, said: “One of the proudest moments of my life was being bestowed as an OBE for services to Entrepreneurship, Innovation in Pharmaceuticals Services and Philanthropy by HM the Queen in 2017.

“It was our future King, HRH the Prince of Wales, who presented the award on her behalf, and I still remember distinctly the feeling of huge honour at being recognised in this way by our treasured monarch.

“Earlier this year I was also humbled to be asked by the Lord Lieutenant of Leicestershire to become a Deputy Lieutenant and representative of Her Majesty to promote working together across voluntary services, business, and cultural life in the county.

“My deep respect and admiration for the Queen stems back to my parents, who held the monarchy and their role in uniting the Commonwealth countries of the world in peace, in the highest regard.

“As has been the case for many of my generation, we have developed and grown older, under the Queen’s reign, and for many her sovereignty is all that they have ever known. Our nation and the world owe a great debt of gratitude to Her Majesty for her selfless life-long service, not just to the UK, but to all Commonwealth nations.

“She has ushered in a new Elizabethan Age, which has seen enormous changes to societies. But under her influence, a desire to do-good, persevere and succeed for the better has shone through, even during the darkest of times.

“As we mark Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee, I would like to say ‘thank you’ for your unwavering commitment to duty and steadfast resolve over the past 70 years. “