Our Legacy Project Team for Team
Posted on August 15, 2020 by Delyth Morgan-Coghlan (Del)
What's our purpose as a team building company? How our Team For Team social responsibility programme came about in the face of a pandemic and what drives us forward into a new and changing world.
Just before the first lock down in March 2020 we had planned to have a company get together. An opportunity to stop for five minutes and appreciate everything that we do together, facilitating team building events for companies throughout the year.
It's a great opportunity to reflect, to talk through what we've learnt while running team building events - what's on everyone's mind, what are their priorities, what's important to business right now and how has that changed over the past year. This reflection, which we do annually, allows us to brainstorm new ideas so that we can stay relevant to the companies who call on us to help them develop their teams. When we think about it, we realise how much of a responsibility it is. We touch over 3000 corporates a year with our team building and event management services and we've been doing this work for over 10 years now. So that's 30,000 people who we've touched and helped improve their capability and their state of mind as they go about their business. That's an amazing stat!
But just as we were on the verge of getting together in 2020, Covid19 hit and everything changed. We moved from a real meeting to a virtual one and what dawned on us was that there was a danger that we might not have a business anymore. We couldn't just review the year and tweak things like we'd done before. We needed to completely re-think what team building was all about, what role we could play for our clients in a new world and what our motivation would be to pick ourselves up and start again. We were refunding deposits and cancelling bookings every day and we knew there'd be nothing left to reinvest in the business. All we had was our experience, our passion and our determination.
So there we were, on a zoom call, talking about why we should bother, what would make us get up in the morning and what we could do to make a real difference in a world that was about to change dramatically.
The business needed to be more than just about being in business. More than making money and more than just a job. I shared with the team the inspiration I had felt over the years listening to Sir Ken Robinson talk about the future of education. His philosphy was that if we could educate our children on how to solve problems, harness their creativity and learn how to work together then the future would be bright for them regardless of what the world looked like. And there we were looking at a dramatically changing world in front of our very eyes. So Team for Team was born. Our legacy project. Our way of making this business more than just about us.
Team for team is our social responsibility. On a regular basis, companies who book activities with us, that meet our minimum requirements, are offered the opportunity to nominate a school, youth group or organisation to receive a team building activity, free of charge or at a highly reduced rate to cover costs only, for the same number of people who took part in their company activity. Imagine if we could reach hundreds of young people a year and teach them through fun team building challenges and activities how to work together, how to be great team members and how to be great leaders? So that's what we now do.
"The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions"
Talk to us when you book your next team building activity to see if your booking meets the criteria and find out how we can help.
We'll report back to you with pictures and a story of our experience with the young people we meet so that you can share it with your people too.