After what’s been a challenging year for everyone, we’re over the moon to have won the Corporate Social Responsibility Award in the Buckinghamshire Business Awards, which shines a light on the work we do in the community and with young people in particular.
And why do we do it? We do it because we believe it’s the right thing to do. No matter how tough the times, putting something back is not a luxury. It should be a vital part of any business’s responsibility because it provides economic, social and environmental benefits for everyone – from clients and employees to the wider community, particularly local charities and young people.
It’s also a heartfelt commitment that goes right back to the very early days of the business. When our managing director, David Hall, was 17, he did a work-experience placement in IT that changed his outlook, aspirations and ultimately his life. “Being able to benefit from hands-on learning within the industry was extremely powerful,” he says, “so to now be able to help the next generation of young businessmen and women fills me with immense pride.”
This fantastic award follows on from our Silver Corporate Social Responsibility Accreditation in September 2020, for which we had to evidence our commitment to the benchmark four pillars of environment, community, workplace and philanthropy. We were also voted Small Employer of the Year 2019 by the Careers and Enterprise Company.
Here’s a quick look at what our CSR ethos includes…
The new Cloudy Foundation
In January 2021, we established Cloudy Foundation, a new charity that links together many of the initiatives we’ve had in place for years. Our partners include Microsoft Education, Buckinghamshire Skills Hub, the Careers & Enterprise Company, CSR-Accredited and Study Higher. We’re all on board to help young people improve their life chances by engaging them on exciting digital tech projects that are socially useful and positively impact their communities.
Find out more about the Cloudy Foundation here.
Donate2Educate campaign
We decided to mark the Foundation’s launch in January with a new project, Donate2Educate. Conscious of the difficulties faced by school children who were at that point “working from home”, trying to keep up with remote lessons without access to a laptop, desktop computer or even a tablet, we put out a call to collect spare computers from businesses and families in the north Buckinghamshire area.
Each one was factory-wiped and restored to perfect working order, then distributed via our partners at Bourton Meadow Academy in Buckingham and the young people’s charity, Transitions UK, to students in need. To date, we’ve been able to pass on 89 computers, and it has made a huge difference. As one local parent, Daniel Pegram, explains: “The team at CloudyIT have helped by providing a laptop for my son to do his schoolwork on. What fantastic people to do such a thing. I’m so grateful to them for supporting the local community.”
With over one million children suffering digital exclusion in the UK, we are determined to carry on doing our bit to help. If you have spare computers or tablets, find out how you can donate them here.
Cloudy’s Tech Labs and Enterprise Academy
Through our Tech Labs and our Enterprise Academy, young people get the opportunity to work on digital projects that help businesses, councils and the wider community. They’re an excellent way for students to explore and develop their technical aptitude and creativity and build up those all-important “soft” skills so vital in the workplace, including good communication and teamwork skills. And the end goal? To open up young people’s horizons to exciting new learning and employment opportunities.
The Tech Lab programme runs online in schools and colleges. It’s connected to our Challenge Cloudy initiative – where an organisation such as a local council sponsors the students to find a digital solution to a real-world business problem. Tech Lab participants can also graduate into the Cloudy Enterprise Academy, a community hub for young people’s self-directed learning. It’s a supportive place for them to share ideas, be mentored by alumni peers and advisors from the business and educational worlds, and take up opportunities to work on exciting business projects and educational challenges.
Our first Academy student was Aaran Chauhan, who took some time out in his summer holidays when he was 15 to create an app, with our guidance, for Campbell Park Parish Council. This enabled members of the public to report any park issues, turning this into a task for the landscaping team to take action on.
Seeing (and saving) the wood and the trees
Great IT support doesn’t grow on trees, but it can help trees – and people – grow. Part of our commitment to the wider community includes the environment, and much of that is intrinsic in what we enable you to do. For example, moving your organisation’s IT infrastructure to the cloud empowers you to adopt more eco-friendly working practices – including ditching all those photocopied meeting agenda packs and saving a small forest of paper in the process. We even use biodegradable peanut packing when we’re shipping kit out to you – and yes, it is literally peanuts, but every little bit helps.
We’ve also teamed up with Sustainably Run, a social enterprise that offsets carbon emissions and helps some of the world’s most impoverished communities by planting trees to create renewable forests. For every client who joins our modernisation programme, we’ll have a tree planted in your name – officially offsetting one tonne of CO2 – and send you a certificate of proof. We’ve had over 100 trees planted to date, and we’re now upping the ante by committing to planting more for every event we run (see below).
Free information summits
We’re always keen to support our clients and keep you up to date with the latest information, trends and tech to make your lives as stress-free and productive as possible. A big part of this is our year-round programme of virtual summits and mini summits, free for all attendees. Recent events include Web Accessibility, Meeting & Document Management, and Cyber Security, which you can catch up on here.
Coming up, we’ve got a summit on 29 June exploring Cloud Productivity & Finance for councils and law firms, then on 29 July and 26 August we’ll be hosting one-hour mini summits to bring you a guide to broadcasting council meetings, and how to build the modern agenda pack, respectively. And if you want to find out more about how corporate social responsibility is shaping up to be the new normal, don’t miss our special summit on this very subject on 28 October. We’re being joined by a panel of leading industry experts exploring how social responsibility is creating a new legislative and ethical landscape, and how this impacts councils, charities, legal firms and other businesses.
Reserve your free place on any of our summits here.
Here’s how you can help
As corporate partners to Cloudy Foundation, we are dedicated to supporting the charity to create unique technology-led opportunities for young people.
We encourage our business partners to challenge Cloudy to come up with a digital solution to a business problem that can be fed into a Tech Lab or Enterprise Academy as a sponsored project, and we support colleagues and people from trusted organisations to volunteer their time and expertise to coach and mentor these young people as part of the experience.
Here’s how you can get involved and make a difference!
If you’re interested in partnering with us on our socially responsible work, want to sponsor a Challenge Cloudy app, know a young person interested in learning practical tech and interpersonal skills for the modern workplace, or are able to volunteer to help them, then please let us know at: https://cloudyfoundation.co.uk/register.
