| The company offers an extensive range of volunteering opportunities, including: - It was one of the founding partners of Right to Read, a major campaign launched in 1999 aimed at improving literacy standards among seven to 11-year-olds across Yorkshire and Humber.
- It is also involved in Number Partners, which brings together business volunteers and schools, providing extra help with maths for seven to 14-year-olds.
- Science and engineering ambassadors - where employees help to enthuse young people and develop links between what they learn at school and the world of work.
- Linking up with the School Governors' One Stop Shop, Yorkshire Water has employeees who are governors within their local community.
- Employees volunteer to act as ambassadors for the company and give talks and presentations to organisations across the region.
- The company is a keen supporter of the Yorkshire Challenges, which were established in 2001 by Business in the Community. Teams are encouraged to choose a community challenge to work on.
- The Halifax 'Blue Sox' Rugby League After School Club - based in The Shay Stadium - this is aimed at raising literacy, numeracy and ICT attainment levels. Yorkshire Water employees attend weekly sessions to help at the club.
- GCSE mentoring - set up in 2001, working in conjunction with Education Leeds, this is an initiative working with students who have predicted borderline grades.
- Waterwheelers was formed in 1995 and is a charity run by Yorkshire Water which every year organises fundraising events to support local causes.
- Yorkshire Water supports WaterAid, the UK's specialist development charity working to help some of the poorest countries in Africa and Asia to provide themselves with a safe water supply and adequate sanitation.
- Cool Schools was launched in 2002 to combat the damaging effect of dehydration on children's health and the company is installing water coolers in every primary school in the region.
VE's Penny Gee visited the firm's Bradford headquarters and spoke to Anne about the company's volunteers. "For the last three years we've had 25% of employees taking part in our programmes - and this year we've seen a significant increase because it's now within our company vision, one element of which is that in five years time we'd like to be known as the national role model for volunteering. So we have had a little bit more awareness in terms of people being able to sign up for it. We envisage that we will be over 30% by the end of this financial year - which is absolutely brilliant. We've engaged as well about 120 of our contract partners so far this financial year, because they come in as part of our challenges in the areas that we're working in - Balfour Beatty, Gleeson, Laing O'Rourke, Mott McDonald Bentley. What is really good now is that the contract partners are actually taking the lead from us - and they're going off - off their own back they're doing the projects. So it's really embedded in what we do." I asked Anne how do they coordinate all this - is there a volunteer manager? "Until April, there was me - it is my full-time job but I also deal with all our education side as well. From April we actually brought in Area Volunteer Champions - and we have I would say a good 10 who are really committed. The idea is that in each building we have somebody who colleagues can go and speak to if they are interested in a challenge. Out at our more remote sites, because we have sites all across Yorkshire, again they are a focal point that somebody can go to; they can provide that one-to-one support, they can chat to people, find the right programmes for them and then feed back to myself. They also help on key projects as well - our Cares at Christmas appeal - we have little roles for people; we have our Chief Wrapping Elf who is responsible for making sure all the gifts are wrapped; our Chief Catering Elf and things like that. I asked Anne to tell me about supervision, support and training: There is an Area Volunteers one-day training course which gives an overview of all the different projects we do and also health and safety training as well. On all our projects we do offer support and training anyway. So if they are doing our Right to Read or Number Partners - that training is offered in-house, and I deliver that. If they're doing GCSE mentoring we work in conjunction with Education Leeds and they actually provide that for us. So there is different training for everybody and we're just piloting Volunteering Plus, which is an accredited recognition scheme in conjunction with City & Guilds. We have 18 of our more established volunteers actually going on that, and hopefully coming out at the end of March with a recognised qualification. Hopefully those people will become our facilitators for the future so that we can then push that out throughout the business. How did community challenge start? By default actually; I found out that Business in the Community had sent an invoice up to our directors which had been paid for membership of Bradford Cares. What we didn't realise was that it entitled us to eight community challenges. Our Cares Programme has literally developed within the last two and a half years. Our first year we did 16 challenges - last year we did 29. This year we envisage it will hit 50 challenges. It is brilliant really. With that and engaging more of our contract partners I think we'll have nearly 700 people taking part in our Cares Challenges this year which is fantastic. It actually now works across the whole of Yorkshire. Originally it was Bradford Cares - therefore everything was Bradford-centric. People would say to us "we want to go and work in Leeds" and we would go and find that. But it wasn't actually widely advertised and people's awareness wasn't as great. So this year we have changed the programme and it's now called Yorkshire Cares and people can go online and find challenges and activities across the whole of the Yorkshire area. We're also engaging the technicians, the operators, the people who would not usually get involved in this sort of thing because they would be too busy concentrating on the core element of the business. For example, last week we had a team of 15 field technicians who normally work in isolation and they all came together, and they did the lighting for a community football pitch and renovated a pavilion and actually put their skills forward into the community. That is the way we'd like to go with it, to engage that sort of element. I asked Anne about the importance of awards: We have a recognition award ceremony in January. We've had these awards for about four years now and they've grown over the years. We have internal awards - primary mentor, business mentor, speaker of the year (judged by area champions, watching colleagues in action in the community), community teams and various other awards. There's recognition as well, a nice luncheon event; all our directors come and present the awards and we raise money for a charity as well. People need the recognition of an award. How does a regional company get to be a national role model? It is very difficult and awards do play a part in raising awareness. We just came across these Year of the Volunteer 2005 awards and we put some entries in, and we were delighted when every single one came back and received something. Our HR Manager Diane Bindley, who won a medal for inspiration, has actually been quite shocked and embarrassed about it all. I asked Anne about the literacy and numeracy campaigns: Right to Read was the very first community project we took on board and (although if we go right back we did have a connection with ChildLine in terms of a small cluster of employees who raised money for them) we were one of the leading players. We had 30 volunteers initially - 80 regular volunteers now and 20 Number Partners. We have people who have been reading for years - for example Donna Kingett (who won a Year of the Volunteer medal for commitment this year); we have some people who maybe do a term or two terms; the beauty of it is you can commit on a term to term basis, and every term we offer training. Number Partners - it has been going for a couple of years and has brought in more men, people from the finance section; it's what makes them tick and is more locally based - for example in Sheffield we have got a team together working in partnership. It's about finding innovative ways of getting volunteers involved, bearing in mind the business needs have to come first. Previously, we have won the Big Issue Corporate section award - a Big Difference Award for the Right to Read team. Our schools do provide endorsement for us. We're trying to get the Queen's Voluntary Awards for our Right to Read team this year. I asked Anne to tell us more about the Yorkshire Cares campaign: Yorkshire Cares is extremely popular. We reckon we're saving £60,000 to £70,000 a year by teams not going on their traditional activities; they are actually choosing now to do the community challenges (rather than go karting, etc) which has produced huge savings. This is a two-way thing for the business. We're strategically involved in the operation of Cares, we're very big supporters of BITC, one of our directors chairs the leadership team for Bradford Cares, I'm on the Operations team and we're definitely the leading player in Yorkshire and Humber in terms of volunteering at the moment. People look up to us and we have to make sure we're continually improving as well and trying to make a difference where we can. I asked Anne about Yorkshire Water's approach to mapping Employer Supported Volunteering to core competences and personal development plans? We have a skills matrix which lists all our projects cross-referenced with the skills enhancement list. Through our Speakers Panel employees can develop presentation skills and confidence - there is a whole range of different elements of skills development you can achieve. If you are looking to develop a particular skill, don't just go down a training course route - take a look at what volunteering can give. For example: to develop leadership skills we give employees a Cares Challenge that involves leading and managing. Our Volunteering Plus course is a follow-on from that - if someone wants to learn something, they can detail that at the beginning of the course and set out their personal and professional objectives. This will be reviewed half way through the course and at the end: what have you learned, what would you do differently and how have you improved yourself? That is where we get the City & Guilds accreditation. We're moving quite strongly on to really integrate it into the heart of the business. I was very fortunate to meet some of Yorkshire Water's dedicated volunteers: Firstly I was introduced to Customer Services Coordinator Paula Kelly, who has been a volunteer for Right To Read since it started in 1999. Paula reads with two children, a boy and girl aged eight, and also works on Number Partners. "You can see the children gain a lot of confidence, I would recommend it for a lot of my team," Paula said. John Herdman, Manager of Procurement and Fleet, has been a mentor for the Newlands programme since it began in 2004. John shares his business skills with small businesses and is also involved in the Cares Challenges. Donna Kingatt, who has been involved with Right to Read for six years told me how children with little hope have gone on to achieve so much and increased their confidence in turn. Donna received the Year of the Volunteer medal for Commitment in September. Head of Legal Services Stuart McFarlane has been involved for four years with Right to Read and, working in partnership with another director, shares Friday lunchtime slots. Stuart was very aware of the time as he had to dash off to read with the children at a local school. IT Manager Dave Perrins, who has been with Yorkshire Water for 27 years, is one of the Area Volunteers Champions. He also told me how he is one of Anne's "backroom boys" who helps out with odd jobs is a Cares Challenge Manager and Chief Wrapping Elf. Dave received a Year of the Volunteer medal for Impact in September. | 