| Thanks for coming everyone. |
| OK, so this meeting is for new staff and staff who haven't been involved with our volunteering projects yet. |
| So basically, the idea is that we allow staff to give up some of their work time |
| to help on various charity projects to benefit the local community. |
| We've been doing this for the last five years and it's been very successful. |
| Participating doesn't necessarily involve a huge time commitment. |
| The company will pay for eight hours of your time. |
| That can be used over one or two days all at once, |
| or spread over several months throughout the year. |
| There are some staff who enjoy volunteering so much |
| they also give up their own free time for a couple of hours every week. |
| It's completely up to you. |
| Obviously, many people will have family commitments and aren't as available as other members of staff. |
| Feedback from staff has been overwhelmingly positive. |
| Because they felt they were doing something really useful, |
| nearly everyone agreed that volunteering made them feel more motivated at work. |
| They also liked building relationships with the people in the local community and felt valued by them. |
| One or two people also said it was a good thing to have on their CVs. |
| One particularly successful project last year was the Get Working Project. |
| This was aimed at helping unemployed people in the area get back to work. |
| Our staff were able to help them improve their telephone skills, |
| such as writing down messages and speaking with confidence to potential customers, |
| which they had found quite difficult. |
| This is something many employers look for in job applicants - |
| and something we all do without even thinking about, every day at work. |
| We've got an exciting new project starting this year. |
| Up until now, we've mainly focused on projects to do with education and training. |
| And we'll continue with our reading project in schools and our work with local charities. |
| But we've also agreed to help out on a conservation project in Redfern Park. |
| So if any of you fancy being outside and getting your hands dirty, this is the project for you. |
| I also want to mention the annual Digital Inclusion Day, which is coming up next month. |
| The aim of this is to help older people keep up with technology. |
| And this year, instead of hosting the event in our own training facility, |
| we're using the ICT suite at Hill College, |
| as it can hold far more people. |
| We've invited over 60 people from the Silver Age Community Centre to take part, |
| so we'll need a lot of volunteers to help with this event. |
| If you're interested in taking part, |
| please go to the volunteering section of our website and complete the relevant form. |
| We won't be providing any training for this |
| but you'll be paired with an experienced volunteer if you've never done it before. |
| By the way, don't forget to tell your manager about any volunteering activities you decide to do. |
| The participants on the Digital Inclusion Day really benefited. |
| The majority were in their seventies, |
| though some were younger and a few were even in their nineties! |
| Quite a few owned both a computer and a mobile phone, |
| but these tended to be outdated models. |
| They generally knew how to do simple things, like send texts, |
| but weren't aware of recent developments in mobile phone technology. |
| A few were keen to learn but most were quite dismissive at first - |
| they couldn't see the point of updating their skills. |
| But that soon changed. |
| The feedback was very positive. |
| The really encouraging thing was that participants all said |
| they felt much more confident about using social media to keep in touch with their grandchildren, |
| who prefer this form of communication to phoning or sending emails. |
| A lot of them also said playing online games would help them make new friends and keep their brains active. |
| They weren't that impressed with being able to order their groceries online, |
| as they liked going out to the shops, |
| but some said it would come in handy if they were ill or the weather was really bad. |
| One thing they asked about was using tablets for things like reading newspapers - |
| some people had been given tablets as presents but had never used them, |
| so that's something we'll make sure we include this time... |