We have been spending some time thinking about our CSR activities for the year ahead and have lots of ideas which we can’t wait to share.
Our new CSR committee
Of course, with a new year comes a new CSR committee! This year the committee is larger than ever – a testament to how much we care about CSR at Ghyston. Dave, Suzie, Rich, and Lloyd will all be helping us achieve our CSR goals this year:
Dave:
Since joining Ghyston back in May, I was really impressed by the drive and enthusiasm of the CSR team, and was really keen to get involved as part of the committee for the coming year. My bachelors degree is in Geography (a very long time ago!), and as a passionate SCUBA diver, I’ve always been interested in protecting the environment, particularly our oceans and inland waterways.
Suzie:
Having joined Ghyston in September as a developer, I have been really impressed by the company's commitment to sustainability and giving back to the Bristol community. I'm excited to be part of the CSR committee this year as there is loads of exciting stuff in the pipeline!
Rich:
This will be my 3rd year of being a CSR Officer which is a great addition to my role as Account Manager and privileged to be part of the team. I’m passionate about sustainability and how we can create positive behaviour changes throughout the business be it how we power our homes, our supply chain and how we buy things or how we get to work! I’m a keen cyclist, heavy metal music lover and enjoy working with our awesome clients!
Lloyd:
This is my first year as a member of the CSR committee and having only joined the company last November I have already been Tree Planting and helped create the new CSR Survey for 2022. Having studied Environmental Geosciences at university, I am hugely passionate about the environment and hope to pass this passion on to fellow colleagues here at Ghyston. Together we can help educate the next generation and protect the future of the planet.
Focus for 2022
One of our main focuses this year will be becoming a B-Corp. This is essentially a certification we can achieve to prove that we are a sustainable, environmentally-conscious company that is kind to its employees and makes a positive impact on its community. Fortunately, these are already values that we embody at Ghyston with initiatives such as CSR and our growing efforts in the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion sector; however, the B-Corp application asks us to provide solid evidence for all of the work we do and we are therefore thinking about effective ways to monitor our CSR progress. Though this will be challenging, we’re more than ready for it, especially since introducing a proper framework for tracking volunteering time (as an example) within the company will provide long-term benefits outside of our B-Corp status, since it will hopefully make it easier for us to justify carrying out volunteering during working hours. Overall, we in the CSR committee feel overwhelmingly positive about Ghyston’s decision to become a B-Corp and we’re optimistic that, as well as receiving the certification, the application will provide us with an improved foundation from which we can build CSR opportunities in the future.
Volunteering has also been the subject of the new committee’s first discussions of the new year. Proposing a variety of volunteering opportunities and events is a great way to promote employees to get involved with CSR, and we’ve been busy coming up with lots of ideas. Building off the success we had with tree planting last year, we’re looking to get involved with more tree planting schemes alongside One Tree Per Child soon – getting trees planted across Bristol is a fantastic cause that we are proud to contribute to. In addition, we are going to utilise our technical expertise to assist charities who require it – we are still working out how best to implement this, but if you are a charity in need of software assistance, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
As well as proposing our own ideas, the new committee have reached out to the rest of Ghyston to see what they would like to see from CSR this year. We’ve sent out a survey across the company and are collating results at the moment – we look forward to receiving some great ideas from everybody here. It’s not only the CSR committee at Ghyston who care about our causes, but the whole company as well, and so it only makes sense to get all of Ghyston involved. We’re looking forward to a great year for CSR at Ghyston and have set some lofty annual targets, but I’m sure that our fantastic new committee will help us get there.
