It’s Business In The Community’s Responsible Business Week and all week long we are talking about what it means to be a responsible business as well as sharing some of our CSR highlights to date. Today we are talking about our various initiatives within the Community and in this blog we focus on our fundraising and volunteering highlights to date.

Fundraising and Volunteering  area that adi employees are extremely passionate and proactive about. Whether it’s supporting our chosen charity of the year through events or participating in and supporting charitable events outside of work, we’re keen to support local initiatives within the community – large and small. In fact, the past two years the Group has contributed over £40,000 for various charitable causes and has volunteered some 900 hours supporting events and causes.

For the past three years, the Group has elected a lead charity to support throughout the year with all internal fundraising events in aid of the elected charity. In 2014, adi supported Birmingham Children’s Hospital raising over £5,000 and in 2015 we proudly supported Barnardo’s raising £4,800. In 2016, we are delighted to be supporting Heart Research UK with all of our fundraising initiatives this year with over £3,000 raised to date.

We are particularly proud that a number of our employees are involved in arranging fundraising events for our chosen charities of the year through their own initiatives from easy fundraising pages, bike rides, marathons, supplier raffled, bacon sarnie mornings and more. It’s our staff that drive our fundraising and volunteering activities and have made our events such a success.

One of our success stories from 2014 and 2015 is the adi Annual Charity Football Tournament organised by Varun from adi’s Climate Systems team with assistance from the adi Football team. The tournament involves several Birmingham based businesses vying for the title in a highly competitive summer tournament. In 2015, the football tournament became the event that raised the most money for Charity and received glowing feedback from all teams involved who asked when the next one was! The success of the event earned Varun the Fundraiser/Volunteer of the Year award in the adi employee awards for his achievements.

A further employee led initiative is the hugely popular head office tuck shop introduced by Chloe and Jess in the admin team. The tuck shop stocks an ever-growing amount of snacks and drinks and contributed over £700 towards our chosen charity of the year in 2015.

But it’s not just the large charities that we support. Outside of our chosen charity of the year the Group continues to support smaller charities as well as larger nationwide campaigns such as MacMillan Coffee Mornings which our Banbury site co-ordinate, Wear It Pink, Jeans For Genes Day and the St Basils Sleep-Out which 20 employees took part in last year raising £4,000.

This year, we hope to top the amount raised in 2015 to Heart Research UK support pioneering treatments and techniques that will allow many heart patients to live healthier, happier and longer lives. We also hope to continue to contribute to causes and volunteering projects in the local area such as part of our continued commitment to the local community.

Keep an eye on our website for updates on our progress and highlights from our fundraising initiatives this year.