Principal partners of The Albion Foundation, National Gas, completed a generous community giveback day at partner school Mayfield School last week.
Over 30 staff members from the System Capability & Risk unit went along to the Heathfield Road branch, which provides education for up to 310 pupils with learning difficulties.
The team painted fences in the school playground with the help of Site Manager Richard Dawkins, who was extremely grateful for their help.
“National Gas have been helping out with the fences today,” Richard said. “With budgets, it comes up as quite expensive so having those volunteers come in today is very helpful.
“Just having that workforce here to actually get a quite large job done, is fantastic. To bring something for the children to be at the standard required in all schools.
“The site isn’t purpose-built for the needs of the children, but obviously they deserve the same as everybody else. By doing this, it makes it more pleasant to look at and brings it up to the standard expected.
“We’re more than grateful, it’s a massive help, it really is. They’re always welcome here and it’s nice to receive their help.
“We’ve had a great response previously when they helped and they’ll always be welcome at the school. We can only say thank you.
“Just for the site itself, it’ll be more pleasant to look at and it’ll be great.”
For Sameera Shakir at National Gas, the most important thing is to rally the team, and contribute to their local community in a meaningful way.
“It’s such a lovely place,” Sameera said. “The school needs a lot to be done for them, our teams have been in previously painting and we’re here today.
“We think the school is lovely and caters for everyone, of lots of different ages. It’s marvellous to have this in one building – we’re so glad we’re part of this.
“My team have been the best. They’ve been lovely, I’ve worked on getting this together for the last three to four months.
“We’ve also been fundraising for the school, so we’ve managed to get some money together to help their cause. The team has come together to do that fundraising which is great.
“I think it’s very important that we give a little bit back. We’re all here today as part of the community, if we’re able to give back in time or money – today we’re here to give our time.”
Paul Sullivan, Head of System Capability and Risk at National Gas, was most pleased to see his team come together for a good cause.
“The team have been great, we’re a big team, but barring holidays we’ve got pretty much everyone from the team here today. We went for a coffee this morning, so we had chance to chat painting techniques.
“The team are very enthused about doing this, everyone’s taken it on board and enjoying it. They’re very community-conscious.”
