CEO, Anne Mills, Blog

Prize winning partnerships

When I launched our new strategy last month one of our three commitments was ‘working in partnership’, so it really means the world to me and the team that we won the Teamwork Award at last week’s Isle of Man Newspapers Awards For Excellence, along with our partners Isle of Man Post Office, Tel’s Skips and Ballaneven Compost.

 

The award was for our Christmas tree collection initiative that works in the following way:

• The tree collection service is promoted by the marketing team here at Hospice, they also process the payments
• Isle of Man Post Office then plan the routes for collections, and provide a willing group of over 30 volunteers to drive around in the Post Office vans collecting the trees
• The trees are then taken to Tel’s Ltd where they are stored in large bins and put through the shredder
• Finally the shredded trees get passed to Ballaneven who turn them into compost, some of which we then get back to use in our beautiful  gardens

 

It is an incredible process and one that requires a lot of collaboration and many hours of physical labour. I am so humbled that so many willing volunteers from these wonderful organisations so enthusiastically give up their time at a time of year that is so precious to most of us.

When we initially started this project we were doing everything ourselves which meant we were limited to collecting about 30-50 trees per year. The partnerships we have developed in recent years have enabled us to grow this initiative from one that brought in approximately £300 per year to one that now generates close to £5,000 per year. Putting this in to context, the partnership working has elevated this project from one that delivered an average of 15 hours of patient care to one that now provides an average of 250 hours of patient care each year. Meaning we are able to support more people to live well, their way until the end of their lives.

 

As far as I am concerned this is the blueprint for the next five years and beyond, and I’m not just talking about from a fundraising perspective. There are so many partnership opportunities that could support our communities in so many different ways, from training and research thorough Project ECHO to our Wallabies Gone Wild art trail, and everything in between.

 

Whatever your business, expertise or interest, I hope you are as excited about working in partnership as I am and if you would like to find out more then I would love to hear from you via this form