As a company, Jenrick IT has always been very active in supporting both our local community and charities that touch us personally as individuals. One of the schemes we run internally, on a half yearly basis, is called “Helping Hand” where our company gifts £1,000 to a deserving cause.

Any one of our staff who has been touched by an emotive and sad situation that has occurred within their life or someone they know, is able to bring this to the attention of our company. Each case is considered on its merits and then the staff vote to decide where they wish the money to go.

Above gives you a flavour of the environment our staff work within and hopefully goes to explain the reasoning behind the decision I took when a highly unusual situation occurred with one of our contractors recently.

To set the scene, I have worked for Jenrick IT for thirteen years and have never known anything like this to happen before.

I had a contractor, that I had not worked with before but who came to me with excellent references and a history of working with companies on a long-term basis, who accepted an initial six month contract with one of my clients.  After he had been on site two weeks he came to me and said that, due to personal reasons, he was unable to continue with his contract.

The contractor told me that he felt an obligation to compensate for the fact that he had to walk away from my agency as he recognised I had placed him in good faith and through no fault of my own, he was letting me down. Therefore he made the decision not to accept money due to him for the two weeks that he had worked on site and requested that Jenrick IT keep this money (£2,375) as a way to make up for what had occurred.

I thought about this situation for a little while and decided that the only right way to handle this situation would be to pass this money on to a worthy cause. I spoke to both the contractor, the client (luckily they were able to replace this contractor quickly and understood the reasons for his departure) and my MD.

My choice, as far as I was concerned, was clear. Our company and certain individual staff members, already give money to the NSPCC as the staff at Jenrick IT, as so many others, are moved by stories we hear in the media of children much less fortunate than our own.

However, I also favoured the British Heart Foundation, another charity that we raise money for.  Some of us having cycled from London to Brighton to raise funds on their behalf as well as fighting against the elements to complete various sponsored runs.

Therefore I decided it was only right to split the money down the middle so that both charities could benefit from this unusual situation.

I am writing this blog whilst a letter that has just come in to me from the NSPCC sits in front of me on my desk thanking Jenrick IT for their support and reminding us that 87% of their income comes from donations and funds raised by supporters like ourselves, so that they can prevent cruelty to children.

I hope this story goes to highlight the fact that as a company, although we work within a very fast paced IT environment, handling business worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, we do not lose sight of the bigger picture within this world we live in and value the fact that we able to give something back to the community that we live within.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article

Jane Stevens - Jenrick IT

Tags: british heart foundation, Helping Hand, Jane Stevens, Jane Stevens Jenrick IT, Jenrick Charity Work, nspcc

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under CSR & Wellbeing, Jenrick IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.