Louise is our first Trainee Social Value Consultant at Samtaler, and we are delighted to have her onboard. Louise shares what brought her to Samtaler and what she wants to achieve in the next 12 months, professionally and personally.

When it comes to social value, it can be challenging to know where to start. Are you doing the right things? What more could you do as a business? Don’t worry; we have got you covered. We have free resources that give practical ideas to create social value and help you understand what ‘good’ looks like.

Suppose you’re the person facing the barrage of social value questions alone. You know what a difference getting this right could make for your company. If only you could get someone senior to focus on it long enough to be effective. We have two magic words for you: ‘Business Risk’.

To score full marks, you need to show not only what you will do to achieve the outcomes they’re looking for but also that you understand the challenges (i.e. what the outcomes mean). This is a critical step that a lot of suppliers miss.

A decade on, we spoke to the three key people behind the Act: Chris White, the MP who proposed the Bill and shepherded it through Parliament; Andrew O’Brien, his then Parliamentary Aide who played a key role behind the scenes and suggested social value as a potential topic for the Bill in the first place; and Mark Cook, a leading expert in sustainable procurement and the lawyer who helped to draft the legislation and negotiate its path through the Cabinet Office.

Our guide to what businesses need to know about COP 26.

It's five years since the Paris Accord was signed at COP 21, and the upcoming summit will address what has - and hasn't - been achieved since then. It will also focus on setting concrete plans to reach the Paris Agreement targets. In essence, the conference will work as a stock-take on how close countries around the world are limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees; the goal was set back in 2015.

Today we're talking to Craig Paterson-Cheyne, Global Sustainability Manager at Wood. Craig shares the benefits of having the Wood sustainability team sit in different business areas, how they aim to educate, empower and enable colleagues across the group to integrate sustainability into their everyday decisions and why we should all be a little more honest about our sustainability and social value journeys.

Today we're talking to Alison Taylor, Executive Director of Ethical Systems and Professor at NYU Stern School of Business. Her work spans both academia and corporate consultancy, and we discuss business culture, critical strategies for initiating ethical changes in business, and what the solution is when a win-win for business and sustainability is hard to identify.

The most important thing is to recognise that supply chain engagement forms a key pillar of any sustainability strategy and that it will be impossible to deliver on your social value commitments without having your suppliers onboard. Here are ten things you can do now to create social value by ESG and Procurement working together.

Today we're talking to Daisy Powell-Chandler, a Director at Public First and host of the podcast for reputation professionals, Why Everybody Hates You. We talk about perceptions of social value, the competence and ethics mix, and risk.

We speak to Pheona and Micheal Matovu, Co-Founders of Radiant and Brighter, about how and why workplaces should diversify, how you know when you are 'diverse' enough, and why they remain optimistic about our ability to change.

We love the idea of Community Benefits – the ambition and legislative push to ensure that local communities reap wider rewards from the money spent by their local authority is to be applauded. However, over the past several years, it has become clear that the benefit isn’t always reaching the intended community despite the best intentions.