The currency blog

As well as the employees of Currencies Direct donating to good causes on a regular basis, Currencies Direct as a company likes to support good works and projects on an ad hoc basis. One of these projects that chairman Mayank Patel has felt passionate about is The Shanta Foundation set up by Waymade Healthcare.

Basildon-based pharmaceutical company Waymade Healthcare has established fresh water and eye hospital initiatives and a university for the teaching of English in India and has also set up a family foundation – the Shanta Foundation – to channel their giving and raise additional funds.
Waymade are a winner of the 2006 Coutts Prize for Family Business, designed to recognise and celebrate the best run small, medium-sized and large family businesses in England and Wales, regionally and nationally. For them corporate philanthropy is an expression of the ethos of the company, what the company is, what it does and how it does it. For these family businesses it’s right to be seen to be doing well by doing good and encouraging others to do the same.

Currencies Direct have donated £5000 to The Shanta Foundation to help their programme of offering free Coronary Care Operations for patients in Nadiad Heart Hospital and Baroda Hospital. The donation also goes towards the Shram Mandir Trust for Leprosy Detection Cure and Rehabilitation.

We had been planning for a while, and the day had finally come!!!
Thursday 17th December was D-Day for the Christmas parties at Hampstead Parochial Primary School.

We were nervous, we were pirates and we were ready!!!

We spent the morning decorating the hall – this is how it looked early on!

You can see Jose and Barbara fitting the red fabric from the ceiling for Santas Grotto and the pirate bunting that Shelley and Phil put up!

This is how the hall looked when it was finished.

This is the completed Grotto, minus Santa but complete with presents for the first party!

And this is how all the pirates looked!!

Initial feedback from the head was “the children said it was magical and the best Christmas party that they had ever had in the school.” Rebecca Hughes - the deputy - also said thank you from the staff - “they were blown away by how well organised and professional the afternoon was.”

Don’t worry - there will be more blogs and more photos over the coming weeks - so watch this space!

Thank you for Reading.

Instead of donating to 3 charities this month, we are concentrating all our efforts onto one project. Not only that, but as a member of Bitc (Business in the Community), Currencies Direct have decided to not only donate our money this month to one charity, but also to donate our time!

Bitc introduced us to Hampstead Parochial Primary School, who are a small C of E parish school that is one of the least funded schools in the Borough of Camden with one of the highest levels of special needs and English as a second language. The school spends all of its funds maintaining the old Victorian school building, which leaves nothing in the budget for any extra curricular activities. Unfortunately, Christmas decorations and a Christmas Party fall into this category. We have volunteered to decorate the school hall and stage and to organise and hold 3 back to back Christmas Parties so that every child in the school gets to dress up, play games, and visit Santa to receive their Christmas gift! Phew! Did I mention the school has over 200 children?

The parties will be on Thursday 17th December, and there will be 10 volunteers from Currencies Direct who are taking part. We are all very excited about the parties at the moment, but to be honest – I’m getting very nervous too and I think that children can smell fear!!

We are building a small grotto on the stage and then turning the main hall into a ‘Pirate Christmas Treasure Island’ with face painting, dressing up, pass the treasure and many other fun activities for the children to partake in!

The plucky volunteers are:

Sara Cuthbert
Ignacio Hernandez
Jose Ivars-Lopez – aka Santa
Phil McHugh
Claire Kelly
Frances Barrance
Deepak Goyal
Shelley Cox
Barbara Manko
Nic Gidaracos

This is the first time that Currencies Direct have been involved in a project like this, and if it goes well it could pave the way for a more structured volunteer programme. We have had some sterling help from people in the office who have obviously donated money, but also helped with wrapping presents. I also need to give a big thank you to Tomas at C3 Imaging Ltd, Peter at Trebuchet Design, Alice and the team at The Gate, who have all been generous in their support and helped to give the party accessories and design a more professional look and feel that we could ever manage on our own!

Watch this space for more details!

The countdown to Christmas has truly begun!

Bjørn Heidenstrøm, from Oslo visited the Costa del Sol area last month, as part of the global journey, which he is undertaking by bicycle and hitch-hiking, to raise awareness of, and funds for the plight of refugees.
Bjørn, a football fan, is a supporter of Liverpool F.C., and Valerenga in Norway where he works as a Marketing Manager. He describes himself as 41 and usually normal!

So far he has travelled 6,000 miles, collecting signed football shirts which will be sewn together to create a flag to be flown at the 2010 World Cup, as a symbol of unity and passion for both football and the plight of refugees. As Bjørn says, the flag will symbolise the “football family standing together and not forgetting the small ones”
Read the rest of this entry »

The weeks are flying by and Christmas is almost upon us! But before we start on the long journey of excess that is the Christmas period, let us reflect on the successes of charity donations in November. Dress Down Fridays have been consistant again, and we raised £168.35.

The break down of this to each charity is:

The Children’s Society £64.68
Oxfam £50.99
RNIB £52.68

This has pushed the Co-operative Wall total to a very healthy £2706. December we are varying from our comfort zone a little and will be donating to just one charity!!

Watch this space for further details!

The clocks have gone back, Halloween is over and we are now firmly on the countdown road to Christmas.. whoo hoooo I love Christmas. Currencies Direct will be starting some extra CSR activities over the coming weeks, more blogs to follow so keep your eyes peeled!!

So how did we do in October? All the usual activities took place, isn’t it funny how we have adapted to the culture of giving regularly. The total is just mounting up with seemingly no effort at all! Why didn’t we think of doing this before! Anyway back to the figures, in October we raised a healthy £225.75. This has pushed the co-operative wall total up to £2538. Another pat on the back to everyone for a job well done!

I am pleased to say that October’s charities will be receiving the following:

The Samaritans - £46.93
Sickle Sell Society - £70.11
Great Ormond Street Hospital - £108.71

GOSH proved to be the most popular charity this month by quite some way. I think this is because we were lucky enough to have Kate from GOSH come into the office and tell us more about the good work they do and other ways that we can get involved.

In November the three charities we will be raising money for are:

Oxfam
The Children’s Society
RNIB

As always don’t hesitate to get in touch with any of the CSR Team should you have any fundraising or charity suggestions.

Thank you for reading!

The CSR Team