After settling comfortably into their new roles, our 2022 CSR committee have been working hard to generate lots of great ideas for promoting fundraising, volunteering, and general charitability throughout Ghyston.
We’ve been liaising closely with our Charity of the Year, Womankind, to decide how we can best support them with their work. They provide many excellent services, including counselling and psychotherapy, for helping women with their mental health – you can find out more on their website at https://www.womankindbristol.org.uk/ . We have a lot of ideas in the pipeline for this collaboration, but we have still found the time to carry out some good old-fashioned fundraising for Womankind: we organised a Charity Saturday event, where people could give up their Saturday to come to the office and work – then, Ghyston donated money to Womankind up to the amount that a customer might pay for that work if we were billing it out. There was a great turnout and we’re very proud to say that we raised a total of £4,375! Thank you to everybody that took part – it means a lot to us that you gave up time on your weekends for a great cause.
In addition to that, we’ve been celebrating an important (and tasty) annual event: National Vegetarian Week! This ran from 16-22 May and encourages people to either go fully vegetarian or to try out some new veggie recipes – how much you want to commit is up to you. At Ghyston we encouraged people to take part by creating a virtual recipe book, where employees could submit recipes to share them with the rest of the company, and we got a lot of delicious submissions. We also created a ‘Veg Pledge’ board in the office that people wrote their Veg Week goals on to share with everybody – embracing meat-free foods, even as part of a healthy omnivorous diet, has a massive positive effect on the environment and so we wanted to encourage as many people to take part as possible. It was great to see the Veg Pledge board covered with notes!
Our B Corp application has been sent off, and we’re optimistic that in time we will achieve the coveted B Corp status. This will recognise that Ghyston is a business for good, and that we promote sustainability, community, and charity in our work. We are doing all these things anyway of course, but earning the B Corp title will allow others to see our achievements and will hopefully attract clients and employees that share our core values.
On the subject of doing good as a company, we recently set up a collection pot to raise funds for Ukraine as a small way of helping the country through very difficult times. Ghyston resonated with the cause so heavily that we managed to raise a massive £1,258.10!
We’re still generating many exciting ideas for later in the year: we’ve got lots of volunteering opportunity in the pipeline, and we’re networking with other organisations to better understand how we can improve our CSR offering. We’re eyeing up some litter picks and tree planting events in our local area, and we’ve also made some ambitious plans for Bike Week 2022 in June - hopefully the British Summer weather is on our side!
