Social responsibility
We mention this not as a way of saying how great we are, but to thank our staff, our clients and others that have supported us over the past few years and equally importantly to help enthuse you should a letter fall on your mat or you receive an email in the future asking you to sponsor us in some way for another worthwhile cause!
At HFM Columbus we have always felt that we should "put something back" and many of us already give individually to various charities and causes, but over the past few years we have taken that a stage further by raising specific amounts of money for set causes involving our staff and clients.
In 2005, we raised over £20,000 for Walton Leigh Special Needs School to upgrade their swimming pool and replace all the sensory equipment which was becoming unusable as the funds weren’t being provided by central government. We did this by way of a Bikeathon cycling from the school in Walton on Thames in a circular route through leafy Surrey for 26 miles. The cyclists included our staff, clients, parents from the school and Edwina Currie who not only started the event but cycled the whole route with us, the weather was kind and a great day was had by all. One of our Directors, Jeremy Hoyland offered to cycle the course twice if his sponsors doubled their offerings, they did and he had to cycle 52 miles!
In 2007, at an industry seminar, the directors saw a presentation by "Facing The World", a charity that specialises in helping children with facial tumours from third world countries by removing them and restoring their faces. We were so moved that we agreed that we would sponsor a child who was on their waiting list. The waiting list was for the money to be raised to fund the operation not a bed!
This charity is run on a shoestring by two top facial surgeons and their teams, volunteering their skills. However the flights, accommodation, operating theatres, medicines, out-patient care and a whole lot more has to be paid for through the private sector. The average cost is £20,000 to pay for a child to come to the UK and be operated on. If this was a British child they would be operated on immediately by the NHS as soon as the tumour was identified.
We sponsored a young girl called Trang from Vietnam; Trang was15 years of age and had a tumour growing in her face that had distorted her looks but more importantly was making her go blind and would eventually kill her if she was not operated on. The authorities in Vietnam did not have the medical skills to sort this out.
We set about raising the money in a variety of ways, some of our staff did sponsored runs, a 10 kilometre and a half marathon, one person with a fear of heights climbed to the top of a climbing wall, a business lunch was organised and a raffle raised over £700 and there were some other efforts organised by our staff. The main fundraising event was from one our directors Gary Festa who did a bike ride through Vietnam starting at Trang’s home town of Hue and ending up in Ho Chi Minh City 6 days later. Gary mentioned what he was doing to a client of his, Ian Fox and in the end Ian joined Gary raising over £4000 himself in sponsorship. The last of the cheques are still trickling in and the total raised so far is in excess of £25,000.