Meeting the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire & Cleaning Up our Environment
This article will take approximately 3 minutes to read
Published 7 Jun 2019 in Phil's blog by Phil Ponsonby
Meeting the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, Mr Timothy Cox
On Tuesday, I had the honour of meeting the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, Mr Timothy Cox, at a reception in Warwick. The Lord Lieutenant is the Queen's representative and previously visited our Head Office in 2015 when he presented us with the Queens Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development. I updated him on developments in Midcounties including our CSR work and talked with him about the importance of community support and creating strong networks across all of the stakeholders.
Coop Group, Manchester
I was at a meeting with the Coop Group in Manchester on World Environment Day on Wednesday so sadly could not join in with our community clean ups. However, I did notice a lot of litter on my walk to the train station and one observation was that there were a lot of fast food outlets but very few bins to place rubbish in and none for recycling purposes.
Cleaning up our Environment across the Society
On getting back I was delighted to be told we had a phenomenal response to our community clean ups as part of our 1 Change campaign. In total on World Environment Day over 700 people from across our 20 Regional Communities took part and they collected over 380 black bags full of rubbish including a significant amount of single use plastics.
The total included over 380 young people and over 270 colleagues who took part in their resplendent black and white 1 Change t-shirts. Among the more unusual items collected on the day were supermarket trolleys (not Midcounties I should hasten to add), road blocks, dead fish and a lady’s handbag.
Our Environmental Ambassador, Cal Major, also took part and helped with a clean up of the river Avon near our Head Office in Warwick on her paddle board. She was accompanied by a small flotilla of canoes including our Communications Manager Nick Milton who had his first lesson on a paddle board. You can see a highlights video of the clean up below.
The community tidy ups generated a lot of good local media coverage including an interview our CSR Manager, Mike Pickering, did with BBC Radio Oxford – you can hear the clip by clicking here.
Pictures of the clean ups were tweeted throughout the day from across our trading area and we received over 140 retweets and over 200 likes including one from Victoria Prentis, MP for North Oxfordshire. To see pictures from the clean ups on our Twitter feed please click here.
Thank you to everyone who took part and in particular to Mike and his team for organising such a successful day.
Yesterday our Environmental Ambassador Cal Major featured on the BBC2 programme Springwatch. She made two films for the BBC about paddle boarding around the UK which were shown on Tuesday and Wednesday and was then interviewed live yesterday. If you missed her you can see the footage of her on BBC iPlayer by clicking here.
Vote for Sally Mayer, Top 10 Most Influential People in Childcare
Finally please don’t forget to vote for Sally Mayer, our Chief Operating Officer for Childcare, who has been listed in the Top 10 Most Influential people in Childcare by Nursery Management Today magazine. The magazine is running a vote to find the most influential person within the childcare sector. Sally has done a fantastic job in running and expanding our nurseries and would be a worthy winner. Voting closes on 12th June and requires just 3 clicks here.
Thats all for this week, if you enjoyed reading my blog entry please feel free to leave a comment below!