17th September 2024 | Blog Posts
You may have seen our post from earlier this year of the Ashcombe School Y5 trip to Morfa Bay. It was the one with the pictures of children covered with mud and faces with enormous smiles. We were in the enormously fortunate position to join together with our brilliant supply chain partners to raise the money that ensured 7 children from vulnerable families were able to benefit from the experience, who otherwise would have not been able to.
Since then, it has been a busy few months for John Perkins Construction and not just on site. Our company mission to ‘make it happen’ extends beyond our sites and into the communities surrounding them. As a company we have always been committed to contributing positively to the areas in which we work and the last three months have been no exception, as we have been involved in wonderfully varied activities to deliver on this.
At the beginning of the summer, we organised for JPC and some of our supply chain partners to sponsor the ‘Summer Concert’ for the YGGIC in Newport, where we are currently building a new sports hall facility for the students. It was a wonderful evening, allowing the students to showcase their musical talents for parents, friends and teachers.
Also in Newport, we were invited to participate in the Newport Links Pembrokeshire Charity golf day, in aid of raising money for the British Heart foundation. The day was a fantastic success, and we were pleased to have been able to donate one of the days prizes.
At the beginning of August Cardiff hosted the 70+ and 75+ Football World Cup. During our years of working in South Wales we have built good working relationships with other local businesses, and we were honoured to be invited to become a sponsor alongside them for the week of matches. With Wales o70s defeating USA in final, but Wales o75s losing out to England on penalties!
Back in Bristol, the JPC Team rallied themselves for the Bristol Airport Charity Golf Day, raising money for the Great Western Air Ambulance Charity. Although the weather did not play its part, the day was a great success, raising an extraordinary £21,000. We were happy to be a part of that in sponsoring a hole and donating a prize.
Notwithstanding the above, these are the headline grabbing events and whilst we are proud to support the communities we work in and their deserving charities, we also understand that there is more to social value and ESG than fundraising and donations.
In the background it is the time that our team gives back to the community and industry on a regular basis that is the core of our efforts, and symbiotic with our company ethos and values.
On a nearly weekly basis across our projects our teams will be overseeing site tours for school children, local walking groups and client stakeholder groups. It is also commonplace for our directors and team to attend career fairs and mock interviews, lending their experience to help guide the next generation.
For example, the business allows our Managing Director, Rupert Perkins to hold unpaid non-executive directorships for several well-known construction industry related bodies and does so to be a voice for other SME’s in this industry on key topics such as health and safety, funding for training and employee pensions.
Contributing in this way to the community and industry is written into the DNA of our business so much so that it is imbedded into our processes and procedures to the point which is it an everyday norm and may not draw attention but does deliver real value to our clients, their stakeholders, the community and our industry.
Perhaps the iceberg is a good analogy for what we should be targeting here. It is not the visible (noisy and PR friendly) where the real social value is added. It is the lower profile, day to day, ‘business as usual’ interventions that cumulatively really make the difference in the long term and they stand as evidence of a socially responsible culture at the core.
Rupert Perkins, Managing Director, John Perkins Construction
