Officials at Nottingham-headquartered Experian have spoken about the importance of volunteering in the community. The global information services firm, based at NG2 Business Park, has donated thousands of pounds to the Robin Hood Fund, in recognition of the challenges people are facing in the city.
In a massive drive to ensure that school children have books to read, for the Children’s Book Project charity, Experian staff have also collected more than 1,000 books. This year, volunteers at Experian have done around 6-7,000 hours of volunteering.
To support the Robin Hood Fund, you can donate here.
Rob Thomas, a business analyst for Experian, said: “We’re conscious the world of work has changed, Experian staff are now hybrid so we’ve had a new challenge of how we can volunteer. We’re mindful of what’s going on in society with the cost of living crisis, children from disadvantaged backgrounds and literacy challenges.”
The headquarters in Nottingham has always had an active voluntary sector. In previous years, staff have even volunteered to paint a school.
Rob continued: “We thought about what we can do as a business to support people. With the book drive, we were asking for donations in a flexible way, we had people printing leaflets off at work and pushing them through their neighbours' doors and the local scouts group got together to help.”
From September 1 to the end of October 2022, 1,300 had been collected for Scotholme Primary School in Nottingham, where 60% of children are eligible for free school meals. Rob added: “It’s been amazing to see how the community has got together from the more senior members of staff to new starters collecting, there have been perks along the way as we’ve collected books reminiscing on some of them, I’m excited to see what we can do next year.”
Richard Donnovan, head of Corporate Responsibility for the company, said: “We are heavily involved in the local area in Nottingham and we saw the Robin Hood Fund as a great opportunity to make a small dent in what is a really important issue.
“A lot of companies outside us are saying ‘we have some real assets, skills, experience and expertise within our organisations. Why wouldn’t we try and make sure we can pass those on into the community and charities?’ So we’ve seen a huge uptick in skills-based volunteering, whether that be going in and supporting school children to give careers advice, CV writing and those kinds of things.”
"We’ve had staff adopt a food bank in Clifton, there have been fundraisers, a spirit giving week, our sales team adopted Welbeck School which is the closest school to our building, the kids came in and did all kinds of activities.
“You wouldn’t even expect that just letting kids into your building and giving them a bit of food and games would make such a difference.
“There is a potential risk associated to us switching from that manual volunteering to giving people more choice but we’ve seen people really take it on.”
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