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The 11-15 June saw a first for Addleshaw Goddard. All three offices participated in a week of volunteering, which together formed our Big Week Out.
The Big Week Out was put together in conjunction with Business in the Community, to help a series of community projects in Manchester, Leeds and London. AG people gave up a day in June to volunteer work on one of five projects, that will really help people with less advantages than ourselves. On the first afternoon of asking for volunteers, over 180 people came forward - that's one every two minutes and in total there were over 340 people who put their name down - that's 25% of the firm.
Manchester people were invited to spend a day during the Big Week Out at Gorse Hall in Stalybridge. This is the remains of a country estate, once owned by Beatrix Potter's Grandparents. 2,500 school children over the last five years have helped to excavate the stable area. Around 80 of our people spent two days, one in sunshine the other in driving rain, building new dry stone walls, picking litter, clearing brambles and doing some general gardening work around the excavated stables and other parts of the estate.
In Leeds, the Big Week Out was at the Little London Community Centre. The Centre, which is a 1970's building, is located in a deprived part of Leeds. It benefitted from a complete internal redecoration, covering the old drab pink, yellow and brown colour scheme. Given the large numbers of our people who came forward to help (@60 per day) we were also able to work on some outside decoration too. We hope that this completed work will breathe new life into a building that is central to many local community and youth groups.
In London, we spent a day working on three gardening and decorating projects in schools across the capital; William C Harvey Special School in the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, where we built a sensory garden; Sudbury Primary School in Wembley, which had a reception class playground spruced up with help from one of our media agencies, Highpoint and the Ellen Wilkinson Primary School in Beckton, where we undertook a number of tasks, including decorating and gardening. These schools projects were part of the London Better Together day run by BITC. Unlike the Manchester and Leeds challenges, the focus was multiple activities on a single day of activity on Friday 15 June - Leeds and Manchester volunteers worked over a couple of days to achieve their goals. |
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