Corporate Social Responsibility

We chose a Charity of the Year - Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY).

We chose Cardiac Risk in the Young as one of our colleagues had a personal reason to put it forward and when we found out about the great work that they do – they won the vote for our Charity of the Year.

CRY's Vision 2011: to work with cardiologists and family doctors to promote and protect the cardiac health of our young by establishing good practice and screening facilities devoted to significantly reduce the frequency of young sudden cardiac death throughout the UK.

Corporate Volunteering – Each employee is given a day's leave to volunteer for their chosen charity or to work within Sapphire's programme. We are also building a relationship with a local school so that we can run projects with them in the near future.

Environmental Action Plan – Global Action Plan are currently working with us to create a strategy to reduce our carbon emissions

So far as part of our fundraising programme -

So far as part of our CSR programme we have appointed a CSR Coordinator – Jan Fair, who reports directly to Ian . We found that people needed to know what CSR is all about so we bribed people with pizza to come along to a lunchtime meeting about CSR.

Sapphire has been taking part in the Heart of the City Corporate Social Responsibility programme for a year now. Ian Caswell, our CEO was asked to speak at a Heart of the City breakfast meeting this year.
Here's Ian with the Lord Mayor (click on the image below)

We formed a committee and then we used Heart of the City's survey to find out what people in our company wanted to do and get involved in. The Staff Well-being Policies we now have in place are - time off to give blood, reduced gym membership, a fundraising team, Ride2Work scheme, child-care voucher scheme, matched funding and language classes at lunch time.

A Word from Jan – "We would like to give our staff the opportunity to be part of the decision-making process of our CSR programme and are currently canvassing them to discover how they would like our CSR programme to develop. Watch this space to see how it grows. So far, we have had some lovely responses – people in this company are already doing great things! "Heart of the City" has introduced me to individuals who have implemented inspiring, ambitious, thoughtful and award winning projects. Our mentor is Marcus Jameson Pond from Addleshaw Goddard. He has been extremely helpful and is a real inspiration. The CSR programme that we embark on will be something that everyone in the company can be proud of."