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Monday, 1st September 2008
John Edmonds, Head of Training at learning and development specialists pearcemayfield, explains why the company are launching a campaign to fund development work in Southern Sudan.
During September, October and November, for every person booking on a pearcemayfield 5-day training course, the company will donate £10 to the work of the charity roots, who provide help and resources to people in Southern Sudan.
This is another initiative in a programme of cause-related projects that pearcemayfield has been developing for the last two years.
As John Edmonds explains, ìpearcemayfield has always been a values-driven organisation, so it was entirely consistent when, at our AGM two years ago, we agreed to begin to commit a percentage of our profits to charitable causes.
ìWe decided early on to focus on two geographic areas ñ the UK and Africa ñ and to do so through contacts that our staff members had with various causes. One of these led to a discussion with the director of a small medical charity based in Oxfordshire and working in a number of countries, of which one was Southern Sudan. Through this and other discussions and research into the background of Southern Sudan, we decided that this was the country to which we would commit our charitable efforts.î
John was then asked to lead their efforts and make a visit to Sudan to investigate what a learning and development organisation could do in a country that was just emerging from 40 years of war and conflict. The medical charity Medic Assist International kindly offered to assist and facilitate this visit and were invaluable in making the appropriate connections.
They decided that this trip would be part fact-finding and part actual delivery of business training. Many Sudanese are setting up small enterprises, but have no experience of business and they are lacking any guidance and mentoring from previous generations of business people, because they simply do not exist.
This is how John came to be delivering a two-day training workshop in a small compound just outside the town of Yei on Product-Based Planning, managing risks, project organisation and governance, and other familiar topics. The workshop, which John describes as ìa sampler of anything and everything in project and business managementî was a great success ñ particularly Product-Based Planning!
Moved by the conditions, the lack of anything that could be described as an infrastructure in the country and the immense gratitude that the Sudanese people showed, John has since led the development of the charity, roots, that pearcemayfield is now supporting.
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