Corporate partnership case studies and testimonials
Below is a selection of testimonials.
In 2008-9 companies donated 1,508 hours of employee time and over £150,000 to help homeless people at The Connection at St Martin’s
Over forty companies are currently involved with us in a variety of ways - from corporate donations to fundraising, employee volunteering, pro bono support and payroll giving. Crucially, some of our corporate supporters are also able to offer work placements to our job-seeking homeless clients.
For the past year Shell International Trading and Shipping Company (STASCO) has been providing us with employee volunteers who work in our cafeteria, serving food to homeless people every Tuesday. STASCO employees are also becoming particularly involved with our Workspace programme - running workshops to help homeless people improve their CV writing and job interview skills. Once our homeless clients secure job interviews they often require suitable clothing to give them a crucial confidence boost, so STASCO have also set up a clothes bank where employees can donate suits and shoes that our clients can wear.
We are going to work with STASCO on a number of exciting employee involvement projects in the year ahead and we are also building a close relationship with parent company Shell International Limited, whose employees also send us job interview clothing, donate presents to our homeless clients at Christmas and helped us to man the phones during last year’s Radio 4 Christmas Appeal.
STASCO has also made a financial contribution towards renovating the education, training and employment area in our Day Centre.
Chatham Financial
Chatham Financial, a capital markets advisory firm with offices in the US, UK, Poland and Singapore, have supported charitable projects in Africa and several community projects in the US for a number of years. In the UK, they wanted to support a local charity involved in the community where their London office is located. Chatham Financial looked for a charity where their employees’ skills would be of real benefit , and all of its employees took part in the decision making process to select The Connection at St Martin’s as their chosen local charity.
Chatham Financial was keen to know exactly what support we needed from them and committed to helping us in the following areas: Days out for clients, CV and interview workshops, support with our Christmas activities, and mentoring newly-employed clients to improve the chances of sustaining their employment and accommodation. Additionally, as many of our clients experience difficulty speaking English, our staff can have problems translating what our clients are saying and this can create a barrier when it comes to addressing our clients’ individual needs. When we highlighted this problem to Chatham Financial, they suggested that as their staff speak a variety of foreign languages among them, they could provide a free translation service for our charity as and when this service was needed and the language was one spoken by a Chatham employee.
This relationship with Chatham Financial has proved a success and their contributions are just an example of ways in which local companies provide invaluable support to our charity in a way that is not limited to financial contributions alone.
To get started call our Fundraising team on 020 7766 5555