Every year, each office elects a final-year management trainee to plan and deliver a community project, with just £500 seed money. Our trainees engage with local stakeholders and charity partners, galvanising our people and supply chain partners to support. In 2021, all challenges were guided by Now or Never.
Read more about what our trainee challengers from our Holdings business, Jack Mead and Beth Lewis achieved…
Jack and Beth chose to support the Helping Herts Homeless charity through improving their IT infrastructure. The charity provides temporary accommodation for the homeless. They also act as a hub for other charities, so that every call they get is assisted and supported when there is no capacity for the charity to house a new resident.
The charity was struggling with their current IT setup, often missing emails and voicemails, meaning that a lot of manual tasks had to take place, which was proving difficult during the pandemic.
Our trainees saw the opportunity to help revolutionise how the charity operates. The team examined Herts Homeless’ current IT infrastructure, focusing on areas that the charity needed to improve. The team identified ways to improve their IT processes, through updating their systems to Office365, fixing their website to improve access, creating a trustee pack to help onboard new trustees and support with voicemail issues.
The scope of the works will enable Herts Homeless to be connected virtually, saving time and resources. It will also mean they’re able to get the most out of their email set-up and avoid missing important information.
“Willmott Dixon have been incredibly helpful in assisting with our IT system update, which will make our work much more efficient. We look forward to building on this and continuing to work with the team." Elizabeth Racine, volunteer at Helping Herts Homeless.
Jack and Beth also set up a donations-in-kind box in our central offices, raising over £400 for Helping Herts Homeless and Mind.
The team also organised a charity walk event called ‘More Footprints, Less Footprint’ where they encouraged the whole company to take part in either cycling, swimming, walking or running. For every mile completed, the team would offset the equivalent of CO2. Collectively, our people totalled 37,777km, resulting in over 4,500kg of carbon being offset.
