The law firm Bates Wells Braithwaite is to launch an award in memory of Stephen Lloyd, its former senior partner who died in a holiday boating accident in August.
The award will support people and projects which have the potential to bring about positive social change – an objective to which Lloyd dedicated the whole of his professional life.
The firm said it hopes to make one award annually, but this will depend on the quality of projects involved. It said it will offer a mixture of grant funding, social investment and pro bono support.
It will look for a project which provides an innovative way of meeting an unmet social need or improving existing provision for social need, which is at an early stage, is "practical sustainable and scaleable", and has a dedicated individual or organisation to drive it forward.
It will be seeking support for the award from other organisations and individuals who might also be interested in supporting such a project. The level of the award will depend on how many other people will support an award in Lloyd's name.
Lloyd was a popular figure in the world of charity, and BWB and his family received many tributes from within the sector following his death.
Plans for the awards were announced by BWB founder Lord Phillips of Sudbury at the annual Hinton Lecture held in London last week.
Phillips said he wanted to use the 17th annual Hinton Lecture as an opportunity to pay tribute to the achievements of Lloyd as well as to Nicholas Hinton – a former chief executive of NCVO and Save the Children, who died while on a peace-keeping mission to Croatia in 1997.
"Weakening of the community spirit"
Phillips told the lecture that he wanted to take as his theme the weakening of community spirit and commitment to ‘the common good’ which he said has had a detrimental impact on social cohesion in the UK over the past 40 years.
He pointed to the Local Government Act 1972 as a highly damaging piece of legislation which he said had sucked both power and authority away from small towns and borough councils. Phillips said this had seriously eroded the sense of community spirit and commitment to local accountability which had previously existed up and down the country.
Phillips said successive governments had presided over the growth in “licensed greed” within large companies and financial institutions. This had created the breeding ground for the alarming range of corrupt business practices now evident in too many commercial organisations.
But he said civil society continues to take the lead in countering the forces eroding our civic life.
“The charity and voluntary sector remains the great engine and reservoir of the common good,” he said. “Thankfully it is still anarchic; and ordinary volunteers - who bring such value to their communities - are still as important as millionaire philanthropists.
“We must never forget that things of the spirit don’t show up on the financial balance sheet - good neighbourliness; trust; generosity; and altruism.”
