How Wates and Big Issue found common ground

A construction company and a magazine founded to pull people out of poverty might look like an odd pairing. Spend a little time with the people behind the partnership, though, and it starts to make complete sense.

On paper, a 128-year-old building firm and Big Issue are worlds apart. One puts up homes, offices, schools and prisons; the other puts a magazine – and an income – into the hands of people trying to work their way out of poverty.

Yet sit the two down together, as happened when Big Issue founder Lord Bird met Wates chief executive Eoghan O’Lionaird, and the same idea keeps surfacing from both sides: they are trying to do the same thing.

“We partner with Big Issue because we share a purpose,” says O’Lionaird. “Our purpose is reimagining places for people to thrive – and that purpose comes to life when we connect with the communities in which we operate.”

It’s a statement that carries real weight from a company that builds thousands of homes every year and maintains almost one in seven social homes in England and Wales.

That common ground is what led Wates to become headline sponsor of Big Issue’s 100 Changemakers – the activists, social entrepreneurs and community leaders nominated by readers for the difference they make.

The timing is pointed. As some businesses step back from social and environmental commitments, Wates has chosen to lean in.

“Good people and good companies, if they’re to live up to their purpose, need to step up, not step back,” says O’Lionaird.

For a family-owned firm, that is less a strategy than an inheritance.

“The company’s motto, all the way through 128 years of business, has been that business done well should be a force for good,” says Anna Mann, Wates’ communications and marketing director.

Chairman Tim Wates, whose family founded the company and still plays an important role, puts it more plainly still: “We’re in business for the long term and social value is something we’re just not going to let go of. It’s very, very important to us as a family.”

It’s another value the two organisations share.

“6.8 million people in the UK are living in deep poverty and a political climate where some organisations are pulling back from their social commitments,” says Russell Blackman, managing director of Big Issue. “Our view is the opposite: this is exactly the moment to double down. Purpose-driven leadership isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what builds long-term resilience, trust and real impact.

“Which is why I’m delighted that Wates have partnered with us. Wates have a genuine, deeply embedded commitment to social value and opportunity creation that mirrors our own and I’m genuinely excited about what we can build together.”

What’s been energising for the Wates team is how much they have personally taken from the partnership and the Changemakers they have met through it.

Su Pickerill, the company’s head of social value, says what strikes her most is “the passion that people who are really changing our world have and how much they can bring a resource to life – the difference they’re making with so little.”

For Mann, meeting the Changemakers has been a corrective.

“Day to day at Wates, we live in a very corporate world and I work in an office,” she says. “I care deeply about people, society and humanity, but I’m actually quite cut off.”

Getting onto the ground, she says, is exactly the point: a chance to understand “what I personally could do to make a little bit of difference.”

Cressida Curtis, who leads sustainability at the company, describes simply being among the Changemakers as “a real buzz”.

“We’ve got 100 people here who are active in their communities, looking at how they can make a huge difference,” she says. “Just being alongside those people” is, for her, where the value of the whole thing becomes obvious.

The next chapter is still being written.

Wates is now matching its business leaders to Changemakers who could use their experience, with the aim of offering practical guidance and, just as valuably, the connections that open doors.

Pickerill is clear about what works. A good mentoring relationship, she says, “is honest, and it’s two-way” – as much about helping someone “lift their heads” as it is about handing over answers. Sometimes, she says, it is simply about confidence: reaffirming people in the direction they are already going.

O’Lionaird, meanwhile, is looking at the bigger picture. Layer one hundred Changemakers on top of the next hundred, he argues, “and we create thousands of believers in and supporters of the idea – that if we give a hand up, not a handout, we aim to eliminate poverty and homelessness.”

Curtis frames it as a meeting of equals.

“That partnership between business and community – as equal partners – could be so powerful. For me, that’s where the future lies.”

Tim Wates expects to pass the company to the next generation of his family within 20 years, by which point Wates will be almost 150 years old. He has no doubt what kind of company he wants to hand over.

“I hope we continue to flourish very strongly as a business,” he says, “but very much as a business that is a force for good.”

Find out more at wates.co.uk

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