Our community

There for you

The community support programme at Chelsea is highly respected by the charitable sector. We have assisted hundreds of charities and community groups local to our head office and branches in the last year, providing equipment and prize donations, design and printing of literature, and voluntary work by our staff. Since November 2007 staff have given over 800 hours of their time for various causes.

‘LINC is continually amazed at the wonderful support we receive from the Chelsea Building Society.  We truly value their help, advice, expertise and their commitment to the community.  As part of our tenth anniversary, LINC ran a poetry competition for key stage 2 pupils, with selected poems to be included in a poetry book. 

The illustrations and finished book were beyond our expectations and we can not thank all that supported LINC with this project.  Which was not only a great fundraiser, it was wonderful  how this benefited the children and their families who took part. It felt great to see the children so proud of their published work.’

Karen Organ
LINC

How to apply for support

You must be a registered charity or a community group local to our Head Office or branches. We seek to support those who are disadvantaged and this year we have committed 20% of our community activity to addressing homelessness, debt advice, housing and financial education to reflect our values and our mission as a building society. We will be more proactive with this in the future.

Charity of the year

Each year staff nominate a charity to focus their fundraising activity on.

This year they have chosen Sue Ryder Care, who provide compassionate care and support for people living with serious illnesses and conditions, as well as their families and loved ones.

They are dedicated to helping people get the best from their lives, by helping put back what conditions like multiple sclerosis, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, stroke, brain injury and cancer, take away: freedom, comfort, reassurance and self-esteem.

We asked charity fundraisers to pitch their ideas and tell us why our staff should choose theirs as charity of the year. Sue Ryder Care received the majority of staff votes and had an excellent package to engage staff, including volunteering opportunities and exciting fundraising ideas. This is our fifth charity of the year campaign and we have set ourselves a challenging fundraising target of £20,000 for 2009.

Volunteering

Chelsea in the community

One of the aims in last year's CR report was to encourage our staff to get involved in community volunteering. We recognise that charity and community groups need our time as well as monetary contributions and that this is often invaluable. We are very pleased to say that our volunteering programme has really taken off this year and several staff are now involved in volunteering projects.

Lynworth School
Every Thursday lunchtime volunteers visit Lynworth Primary School in Cheltenham and help the children with their reading. Since November 2007, a team of 13 have been giving up their lunch hours to do this.

Great progress has been made and all the children really look forward to seeing their Chelsea reading volunteers.

Soup Kitchen
Every week two Chelsea volunteers help at the Cornerstone Community Centre's lunchtime soup kitchen in Whaddon, providing a valuable service to disadvantaged people.

Winston's Wish
Winston's Wish needs help with events and collections. Our staff volunteer at supermarkets, football grounds and Cheltenham Racecourse for our charity of the year partnership.

Gardner’s Lane Children’s Centre
Ten members of our Lending Department completed a team challenge in two days for a children’s centre in a deprived area of Cheltenham. 

They made vegetable beds, painted murals and tidied up the pond and play area.  One of the team said ‘I really enjoyed our time at the centre, all the staff were really welcoming and it’s nice to be able to help such great people doing such an ace job for the local community. 

I’ll definitely think about future volunteering in the New Year.’ 

Redecoration project
The Cornerstone Community Centre in Whaddon was in desperate need of redecoration and our Audit department were looking for a volunteering project in our local community. The team gave the outside of the building a much needed makeover for two days at the end of May, much to the delight of local residents.

Christ College work placement

Five students from Christ College came to Chelsea for 2 weeks in July as their work placement. They worked on a project which involved creating web pages for the Chelsea Cares website that would give visitors an insight into what it is like to be a student at Christ College and what the ICT Diploma entails; a new course developed in 2008.

Chelsea gave the students this opportunity because we feel this experience shows the students involved in the ICT Diploma what it is like to work in business.

The Christ College pages are the work of the students involved in the project and have been designed and built by them.