Bert Hamelinck on Charitable Connections

They say that charity begins at home, but Caviar Content has made a point of making charity a part of their business. Here, Bert Hamelinck, the Caviar Group's MD, explains why the company decided to support SOS Children’s Villages and why the advertising industry needs to stand up and be counted when it comes to social responsibility.

Why did you think it was the right time for Caviar to partner with a charity?

As a company we’ve always tried to be engaged and reflect on how our own growth speaks to both local and macro-economic changes and shifts. For us sustainable entrepreneurship and mutual respect have increasingly become the number one objective and we've always been concerned with equal opportunities and the fight against poverty.

One billion people were taken out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010 and these significant figures forced us to think about our own contribution to the Millennium objective (to pull another billion people above the poverty line by 2030).

We felt that as a company, thanks to our own greater financial stability, it was the right time to partner with the right charity and make a meaningful contribution towards that goal. 

Tell us a bit about SOS Children’s Villages; what made you want to partner with them specifically?

SOS Children’s Villages is a global company that builds villages around the globe to give orphans and kids whose parents are unable to take care of them a home. The kids live in a house with a “mother”, and have access to schools and hospitals. They stay there until they’re a certain age and until they ready to take on the world on their own.

On a personal level: all of our partners have kids so the fact that they help kids was definitely something we liked. Kids are the future, after all.

And seeing Vincent Kompany’s documentary about his village in Kinshasa definitely inspired us. We are sponsoring this village in particular. As you might know Vincent Kompany is Belgian, and his dad is from the Congo.

When we decided to support SOS, in December 2013, the typhoon in the Philippines had just happened, so we decided to give the first chunk of money to them. Also through SOS Children’s Villages.

Do you think that enough is done within the advertising production industry to help charitable organisations?

Well, there are a couple of initiatives that I know of that are amazing. Movember for example, although that’s not strictly advertising. There are also Fireflies West and Fireflies Cannes, two sponsored bike rides from San Francisco to LA and Geneva to Cannes that take place once a year.

Caviar has sponsored the event for the past two years; we hope that this initiative spanning between Europe and the US will also help encourage other companies with global networks to start working together.These two initiatives support the fight against cancer, which is another reason why we chose a charity that supports Third World countries and children specifically.

And in general: you can never say that enough is done, the more the better!

Is there sometimes a cynicism around companies talking about charity work because it’s seen as self-serving?

There is nothing cynical about giving away profit that would otherwise go to your shareholders or to investments for your own company.

And if you do see it as self-serving, well that would be a weird way to approach charity…

Does is even matter if it is self-serving; isn’t it better to help a charity than not regardless of what a person or company gets out of it?

Yes! The result is definitely the same.

Recent successful initiatives such as Ben Gregor’s Yes DRS point to the fact that the industry’s habits are changing; would you agree with this?

I sure hope so! Our global economy benefits from more equal pay, so it benefits us and our companies directly. In that way it would definitely be a good thing.

How can other companies get involved with SOS Children’s Villages?

As a global charity, active in 134 countries, a partnership with SOS Children’s Villages means a company can work with communities where it’s active. This is just one of the numerous benefits the company will enjoy by partnering with SOS Children’s Villages. 

If your company is interested in starting up a conversation with SOS Children’s Villages on a national or an international level, please contact Rina Hillinga via  Corporate@sos-kd.org or via +43 (0)1 368 2457 2520.