City Giving Day, now in its 9th year, is an annual opportunity for City businesses to support the Lord Mayor’s Appeal and other charities, while celebrating their ongoing philanthropic activities.
City Giving Day champions volunteering and philanthropic activities undertaken by City businesses to support charities, the environment and society as a whole, providing a focused day for City firms to showcase their annual social impact achievements as well as fundraise on the day for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal, their own corporate charities or join one of the many City Giving Day events.
Since launching in 2015, City Giving Day has raised millions of pounds for good causes, including the Lord Mayor’s Appeal which currently supports three core charities; National Numeracy, MQ Mental Health and the Royal Foundation’s Homewards, a five-year programme launched by Prince William that aims to end homelessness in the UK.
For the last six years BE Offices has been an active supporter of City Giving Day with our Corporate Social Responsibility Manager, Julie Tucker, an enthusiastic advocate of the initiative, supporting almost all of the City Giving Day engagement events to encourage other businesses to get on board. This year, as well as having already persuaded new organisations to join the 600+ companies already signed up to take part, Julie has already attended the City Giving Day launch event in the Guildhall Yard and tonight will be supporting a charity Guinness World Record attempt at the longest game of pickleball ever played, in aid of City Giving Day.
City Giving Day typically falls in the same week as the Macmillan Coffee Morning, a fundraising event supported by BE Offices for 13 years and which will be held in all our centres tomorrow. Our participation in this initiative has raised tens of thousands of pounds for Macmillan Cancer Support, a charity which provides vital specialist health care, information and financial support to people affected by cancer.
Throughout the year, BE Offices also supports various other social impact initiatives such as taking part in the Great City Race in support of Futuremakers and supporting a primary school literacy programme through Chapter One, with employees participating in weekly online literacy tutoring sessions with primary school children. Staff also regularly take part in river clean-ups on the Thames foreshore, community gardening and tree planting on Camden housing estates and volunteering with the Scouts to lead summer camping trips.
Our CSR manager also volunteers for Climate Ed, an organisation which provides climate education to primary school children. She has so far delivered 13 workshops to over 120 children. In addition, Julie provides leadership coaching to a head teacher from an inner city school with a high proportion of children from low-socio-economic backgrounds through an organisation called Inspiration for All.
In addition to these activities, over the years, we’ve also funded two-week all-expenses paid international staff volunteering missions which in the past have seen us working with communities in Cambodia, street children and girls rescued from trafficking in Nepal, at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand, on a reef conservation project in Belize and at a turtle conservation project in Costa Rica.
