Our year of giving back gets off to a great start
This year, we’re proud to be supporting local charities and initiatives within the communities our colleagues live and work, as part of our year of giving back.
When we reached out to our teams and asked them to get involved, they were all keen to play their part – coming together help make a difference.
They didn’t however envisage that a global pandemic would make the simple job on undertaking fundraising a lot more challenging. Undeterred however, the first few months of our year of giving back got off to a fantastic start.
We recap on what our teams across our Group have been up to.
Christmas tree collections and promenade walks in January
Our Heysham Recruitment and Strategic Purchasing branch kicked off the year by supporting their local palliative care facility St John’s Hospice.
For several years, the team have lent their support to colleagues on Heysham power station to join the army of volunteers who travel around the local area each January collecting unwanted Christmas trees. Residents pay a small fee for collection, which saw 2,500 trees picked up this year across over 104 routes. Trees are broken down to be sold as biomass fuel, drawing in £34,000 for the hospice during 2021’s tree collection. To support the annual campaign, branch colleagues use their paid charity days to join the collection routes.
Keen to generate their own fundraising as part of a team, despite social distancing stopping them from meeting up together, colleagues across the Heysham branch decided to put their daily exercise to good use. Asking for donations for each mile they walked, friends and family were only too happy to lend their support, and together with additional fundraising activities the team managed to generate £573 for St John’s Hospice.
You can find out more about St John’s Hospice below:
Digging deep to support early years development in February
In February the baton was passed to colleagues managing the supplementary labour requirements on the Keadby 2 power station construction site near Scunthorpe.
With hundreds of workers on site each day, the NRL team set up donation buckets across the site to ask fellow workers to spare what cash they could. Their chosen charity was Epworth Thurlow Pre-School, a local playgroup. The pre-school provides a safe place for early years development, but the dedicated staff have struggled in recent months as COVID-19 has seen their attendance numbers considerably drop, leaving them short of much-needed funds to operate the playgroup.
Spurred on by NRL’s commitment to match fundraising on site everyone gave extremely generously, and once donation buckets were counted £735 had been raised. Together with the promised top-up donation from NRL, the project team were delighted to be able to present £1,750 to Epworth Thurlow Pre-School at the end of their fundraising campaign.
Find out more Epworth Thurlow’s ongoing fundraising activities below:
Logging steps for donations in March
In March we turned to our Recruitment teams in our Woking branch, who provide UK and International services to our clients from their South East office.
The team had pledged to support local Woking based charity Your Sanctuary, who help survivors of domestic abuse in their refuges and with their helpline and local outreach work.
In 2020 the charity provided safety and sanctuary to 83 people in their refuges, which gave the team the idea so set themselves a goal of walking and running 83km together each week to raise donations. Tracking their progress, the team exceeded this 83km target each week – walking and running much further as friends and family kindly sent in donations.
Over the 4 weeks they managed to cover 838.95km together, counting up 1,073,966 steps. Thanks to the kindness of those donating the team managed to raise £515 together to help the charity who recently opening a new 25-bedroom domestic abuse refuge.
Visit the Your Sanctuary website to see the services available across Woking and Surrey:
As the year progresses, colleagues from across NRL’s businesses will be taking part in fundraising and charity support days.