Npower volunteers to help disabled athletes
A team of 25 volunteers from npower’s offices in Oldbury, Solihull and Worcester, will be supporting the England Athletics at Birmingham’s NIA at the first major championship of the 2009 season for schools.
The popularity of the indoor event has increased over the past few years.
Next month around 320 young, disabled athletes from 40 schools across the West Midlands will be competing in the Indoor Disability Athletics tournament making the event one of the region’s major competitions in the annual disability sports calendar.
npower has worked in partnership with the English Federation of Disability Sport for over 10 years providing sponsorship for a variety of sports and events – but it is the volunteering aspect that has resulted in greatest satisfaction.
Carol Hart, community involvement manager at npower, will be leading the npower team at the competition.
She explained: “npower sponsors the annual EFDS Midlands Awards and we regularly attend Midland athletics meetings to give organisational help to young participants. We help with escorting athletes to their starting points and warm-up exercises.
“It’s always a fantastic day and once someone has volunteered, they invariably want to be involved again. It is both an enjoyable and awareness-raising experience.”
npower has recently been awarded a ‘Silver Big Tick’ by Business in the Community (BitC) for its npower Active programme.
In 2008 more than 1,500 npower employees, around 13 per cent of the workforce, took part in volunteering tasks from creating wildlife habitats to decorating a local hospice ready for its Christmas festivities.
The company encourages all employees to take time out of the working week to help put something back into their local communities.
Jacqui Gavin, npower’s community involvement executive helps coordinate the extensive volunteering programme, run in partnership with Community Service Volunteers (CSV); she believes volunteering is both good business sense and a benchmark for best-practice.
She said: “Employees have opportunities to develop their skills outside of the office environment and our research shows that 87 per cent of our volunteers felt more positive about the company after their experience and 81 per cent felt more motivated at work as a result of taking part in an activity. The fact that programmes involve local people means volunteers feel as though they are making a positive contribution to their community.”
Sustained corporate support is invaluable to organisations like the EFDS, as Dennis Hodgkins, regional development manager, explained: “The partnership with npower has meant we can plan programmes and show real advances in the number of sports opportunities we can offer but volunteering is the lifeblood of development; without our volunteers, we would not be able to provide the number of events and cater for the demand there is within our community. I can’t say often enough how important volunteers are to our organisation.”
