Charities around the UK have been hit hard in recent years with the COVID-19 pandemic. Never before have charities struggled so much with organising events and raising money.

Our Corporate Social Responsibility commitments outline our responsibility to our local community and as needs change around us due to the pandemic so does our focus too.

In order to address these changing needs, we took on Ashgate Hospicecare as the charity that we support in our fundraising activities since the pandemic started in order to help Ashgate continue to support those who are living with a life-limiting illness, caring for someone who is or grieving the death of a loved one. Ashgate provides invaluable services to the local community that has had an affect on so many of our team working from our Matlock HQ.

Their far-reaching support and care for those who are extremely vulnerable in society makes them a very worthy cause anyway. Indeed, for many years now, we have offered the use of our signs around the local area for appeals to help raise publicity, as well as help them manage the traffic and with road closures for events such as the annual Sparkle Walk.

So far this year, the value of support MVIS has provided Ashgate Hospicecare through our signs has been £8,071 including delivery!

Anne Ashman, Commercial and Operations Director comments “Ashgate Hospicecare is an integral part of the local community and as difficult as the pandemic has been for everyone, we absolutely can’t lose sight of our commitments to our community. This was – and still is – a time when the community needs to band together to help those who have helped us for so many years. We are proud of the part we continue to play in supporting Ashgate.”

David Storer, Event Fundraiser at Ashgate Hospicecare added, “Anne and the team have provided VMS’s for multiple events and appeals that have really helped to raise the awareness of Ashgate Hospice and the vital end of life care that we provide across North Derbyshire.”

He continued, “MVIS are a pleasure to work with. They are always on hand to provide support across all of our fundraising events and go above and beyond to offer solutions that enhance our reach and help us to promote our brand across the region.”

Ashgate Hospicecare will go on to be our Christmas Charity again for a 2^nd year running, and we have lots of exciting fundraising ideas on the cards this year, adding to the Bake Off we have recently finished, as well as the Car boot sale and the 17 mile High Peak Trail Walk completed by our UK Group Commercial and Operations Director, Anne Ashman earlier in the year.

In support of World Mental Health Day, the team at MVIS and Bartco UK are saying #HelloYellow in support of the charity Youngminds to show young people they’re not alone with their mental health.

MVIS and Bartco UK take mental health very seriously. In the UK, suicide claims an alarming number of lives each year, with many of those in the Highways and Construction industries.

As safety is one of the core foundations at MVIS and Bartco UK, there is no denying the obligation we have in raising awareness of this to help make the industry safer for everyone.

Suicide is the biggest killer of men aged between 20 and 49, with three quarters of registered suicides in 2020 being among men, which has been the case since the mid-1990s. 

We know that the Highways and Transport industries are heavy employers of men, so when research uncovers that 41% of men still don’t seek mental health support when they need it and that men are reaching burnout, something must be done to remedy this with more young men joining these ever increasing industries.

In support of #HelloYellow 2021, the MVIS and Bartco UK team donated money and wore hi-vis or yellow clothing in support of Youngmind’s #HelloYellow campaign, which encourages communities, businesses and schools to wear yellow for the day each year to raise awareness.

Anne Ashman, UK Group Commercial and Operations Director and one of two Mental Health First Aiders for both MVIS and Bartco UK comments, “It’s clear to see just how important the work that Youngminds do is, so it with great pride that we are supporting them again this year with #HelloYellow. We are very happy to support this campaign not just for the fun we have in the office with it, but also because it’s so close to our hearts. It gives us a chance to raise awareness with our team and other’s in the industry to help to encourage people who are struggling to seek help.”

Useful Links and Support:

• Youngminds – Parents Helpline – 0808 802 5544
• Youngminds Donation
• Samaritans – Support Helpline – 116 123
• CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) – 0800 58 58 58
• NHS Mental Health Support – Advice on access to mental health services

It’s been another difficult year so far for charities who, for the first quarter at least, were still dealing with the impacts that social distancing was having on their ability to organise fundraisers.

During this difficult year, MVIS and Bartco UK have been supporting Ashgate Hospicecare with a range of fundraisers organised by ourselves as well offering our signs to help them promote events and important messages to the local area.

In recent months, as the UK has reopened again, fund raising events are back better than ever! The most recent event held by Ashgate was the annual 2021 Sparkle Walk, that saw 1500 people take to the streets of Chesterfield and walk in support of Ashgate. Whilst the amount raised is yet to be determined, it is sure to be substantial.

Our original 5-colour Bartco VMS-A has been of particular benefit to Ashgate Hospicecare, who have used several units to help promote events to the public throughout the year. However, with the Sparkle Walk, it’s different. Due to the scale of the annual Sparkle Walk, several main roads around the area are required to close.

4 of our VMS-A units were deployed 1 week prior to and during the road closures to give drivers warning, which due to how central these roads are to the local area, was an important thing to do.

Doing this offered a safer and potentially a more effective traffic control method due to our VMS-A’s LED lights and adjustable display mast, meaning it can be positioned perfectly for maximum exposure.

So far this year, the value of support MVIS has provided Ashgate Hospicecare through our signs has been £8,071 including delivery!

As Christmas approaches, we are working on exciting fundraising ideas that will contribute to the figure we have raised so far this year, adding to the Bake Off we will be concluding soon as well as the Car boot sale and the 17 mile High Peak Trail Walk completed by our UK Group Commercial and Operations Director, Anne Ashman earlier in the year. 

Here at MVIS, we are lucky enough to be able to show our support to others in the community and be able to spread positivity through sponsorship. Not only do we show our support within our community by sponsoring locally run clubs such as Matlock Town Football Club, recently we have been trying to support a charity which through this pandemic has suffered more than most, Ashgate Hospice.

Ashgate Hospice Care is a charity that provides compassionate, specialist palliative and end of life care, free of charge, to patients with a life-limiting illness and their families across North Derbyshire.

 Despite the high pressures of the last year, Ashgate looked after over 1,680 patients at home, 414 patients on their ward and supported 476 bereaved family members.

This is why we are determined to support Ashgate and what they do for the community and so have held fundraising activities and spread awareness by offering free Original 5 colour VMS units and taking on challenges as a team.

Our latest fundraising activity was undertaken by our UK Group Commercial and Operations Director, Anne Ashman who completed a high peak trail walk of 17 miles on Saturday 10^th July. Anne took on this walk as she is currently training to do a 75 mile walk in 3 days to raise money for 3 charities close to her heart. Being the perfect opportunity to get some training in and raise awareness and funds for Ashgate, she completed the 17 miles in 4 hours and raised £220.

After speaking with Anne she said “Being able to take on this challenge and offer support to such a worthy charity is something that I love to be apart of. Recently we have been getting involved with more charitable work such as our carboot sale, where we raised over £300  and we are currently planning on hosting a cake and coffee event for Ashgate. We have always done what we can to give back to the community and will continue to show our support when we are able to.”

As a company, we wanted to congratulate Anne on her fantastic achievement that she not only shares with Ashgate Hospice care, but also every person in the area who comes to rely on their services.

With our HQ being situated in Matlock, we have it better than most when it comes to views on our way to work. The idyllic scenery that surrounds us is more than just a treat for the eyes however, with many people choosing this area as an ideal place to walk.

Located in the Peak District, Matlock has its fair share of surrounding mountains, which are exciting and beautiful to explore for many people, but it is also highly dangerous under the wrong conditions, requiring the local Derby Mountain Rescue Team to be as familiar with the area as even the locals, bringing with them the responsibility of attending incidents of concern that the normal emergency services would be largely unequipped to handle.

Derby Mountain Rescue Team are a voluntary emergency service who attend callouts in response to requests from Derbyshire Police, East Midlands Ambulance Service, and West Midlands Ambulance Service. Derby Mountain Rescue Team is on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and consists entirely of highly skilled unpaid volunteers.

Their main function is the search and rescue of injured or missing people, principally in upland or mountainous areas, but they can be called on whenever their specialist skills may be of use, such as searching for vulnerable persons in rural areas.

The team are trained for many different types of incident including crag rescue and rope access, missing person search, flood and swiftwater water rescue, and pre-hospital emergency medicine.

As a company, we are also encouraging our team to increase their fitness through walking in the local area during lunch breaks and out of work. Knowing that we have the Derby Mountain Rescue Team watching out for us gives us a confidence that our team are safe when exploring the beautiful Matlock area.

MVIS are very proud to announce that we are now sponsoring Derby Mountain Rescue. Our sponsorship reasserts our commitment to not just safety, but also our local community, helping to contribute both in financial terms and in awareness of all the amazing work the Derby Mountain Rescue Team do.

Anne Ashman, UK Group Commercial and Operations Director commented, “Where we place our support as a company is a very important reflection of our priorities. We want it to be known that we place the highest value on the safety of our team and our local community. The Derby Mountain Rescue Team are highly valuable to our local area and we are very pleased to be sponsoring them.”

Sponsoring Derby Mountain Rescue is just one example of how seriously MVIS takes its corporate social responsibility. We believe that Derby Mountain Rescue is a cause that is very worthy of support and we look forward to working with them in the future.

Donate to Derby Mountain Rescue Team

As an organisation, we are always looking for ways to improve our contribution to the community, in line with our commitments as a responsible business.

In an effort to address our carbon footprint, we have looked to Forest Carbon, who have an initiative called ‘Carbon Club’, which was set up to allow smaller organisations and businesses to address their climate impact.

Purchasing ‘carbon credits’ allows Forest Carbon to plant trees and create new woodlands in the UK on our behalf, which will sequester greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the atmosphere in the years to come.

Whilst not fully offsetting our operations yet, we are moving in the right direction to position ourselves for full carbon neutrality over the next few years.

Doing this allows our customers to also benefit from our activities, offering them an environmentally focused supplier who engages with environmental responsibilities, which for many of our customers is a very important aspect for their environmental commitments too.

But we don’t stop there. Having quality checks done on all of our suppliers and using local suppliers is a small thing that we do to nurture the relationship between the company and society.

Our social responsibility to the local surroundings means always being on the lookout for actions that we can take to improve our impact on the environment. During our staff training we like to discuss what further actions we can take in becoming more environmentally friendly and due to this we currently have a bee house and flower bed alongside a hedgehog house, small actions which may be overlooked however giving back to the environment and local wildlife is vital in working towards a cleaner, safer world.

When it comes to day to day works and our carbon footprint, we try and give back to our environment as much as possible. We promote an in-house recycling scheme and use flatbed transit vans for deliveries and collections of our units.

These vans allow us to be able to transport multiple units in one single trip, minimising fuel consumption and time on the roads. Equipping our units with directional solar panels as well as batteries means that they can be powered completely by solar, reducing the battery changes needed on longer hires and aiding to our reduced carbon footprint.

An additional aspect of corporate responsibility that we have been addressing head-on recently is our local environment. Partaking in litter picks, ensuring our local wildlife system is thriving around our Matlock HQ and also having energy-efficient lighting and heating installed within the business are a few ways that we keep on top of to give back to our community.

For more information about our environmental policies, please see the ‘Environment’ section on our Safety Hub.

MVIS and sister company Bartco UK have always prioritised safety, whether it’s the safety of our customers, the general public or our own team. Safety always starts with our own team however – whether that’s in the form of the training we deliver to ensure that our delivery drivers keep the public safe when out on the road, or if it’s fire warden training for our office staff, safety plays a huge part in our approach to our day to day work life.

As a show of this commitment, a few years ago we launched the ‘Safe Mind’ campaign, which was implemented in our working environment in order to raise awareness about matters of  safety and mental health within our organisation.

However, in recent months, we have expanded the whole initiative to reach all aspects of our safety measures. As the COVID-19 pandemic caused havoc when it came to matters of health and safety for not just business but the whole world, everyone gained a whole new level of appreciation for the concept of ‘safety’.

The introduction of our ‘Safety Hub’ serves to demonstrate our commitment to safety in all areas. It offers a place on our website for our team and customers to read up on matters of safety, from where to go when they need someone to speak to, to the measures we are taking to make our working environment as safe as possible when it comes to infection control.

However, the Safety Hub is much more than a place on our website. Importantly, it’s a state of mind that we encourage in every step of our business. The Safety Hub covers Health, Training, Products & Solutions and keeping the environment safe. All are aspects of our business that necessitate a strong commitment to safety and responsibility, which makes it even more important that we keep focus on them as employees and as a business.

Going forward, the Safety Hub will be a central point in our business in which we promote not just safety itself, but also the importance of safety, referring our team and customers to relevant information in order to make sure they are aware of the measures we take to uphold our standards of safety.

We Believe that the key to a thriving business is being aware of our surroundings and offering support to our local community whenever we are presented with the task. Therefore, we are strong believers in working towards a cleaner future. We try to find resources close to home to reduce our carbon footprint and invest in transport which can be used for duel loading meaning that the trips we take on the roads are reduced. To reduce electricity from being wasted, we have installed energy efficient heating systems throughout our depots as well as motion sensor lighting in all rooms to reduce the chance of leaving a light on when unnecessary.

As well as actively looking for ways that we are able to improve ourselves in being more conscious of our environmental impact, we are always looking for ways that we can give back to the environment. Installing an insect hotel, hedgehog home and flower beds may seem minute, but they are collectively having a larger impact on our local surroundings. Rebecca Prince and Pip Wood in our Stock and Purchasing Department came up with the idea to take part in a litter pic in the local area. This task was collectively agreed and saw 5 of our team take to our neighboring streets and join each other in cleaning those areas which get overlooked every day.

When it came to achieve our ISO accreditations and maintaining them, it is thanks to our staff and their modern day thinking with new and innovative approaches. Quick to adapt to new changes and policies which may be implemented when working towards reducing our impact on the environment has meant that when it comes to environmental safety, we have been able to use this to our advantage in achieving our ISO accreditation in Environmental Management (14001:2015) alongside our two other ISO accreditations; Quality (9001:2015) and Health & Safety (45001:2018).

The last year has been a strange one for everyone, with many businesses forcing to close temporarily or in some cases, permanently, as the economy shifts to new ways of working, new priorities and a new world compared to the one we operated in until early 2020.

Despite this, MVIS have remained operational throughout the whole pandemic, using our solutions and service to help keep the nation safe with safety messaging and important notices. At the same time, we have also been hard at work in the background, looking to see if there is room for improvement of the service we provide to our customers in a variety of ways, from upskilling our team to achieving the very best in industry standard raising accreditations

One of the achievements we have earned recently is Gold Status in the Constructionline programme, which offers a platform for thousands of buyers in the construction industry that enforces an ethos of trust and quality amongst its members. Validating all members, the Constructionline platform is used by buyers to quickly find suppliers that will enable them to complete a whole range of projects in the industry by providing them with a pool of high quality suppliers that they can engage with confidently.

Achieving Gold status on this platform isn’t for everyone, with Gold membership requiring further validation checks using an enhanced prequalification questionnaire that goes beyond those involved in silver. Our credentials were assessed for environmental management, quality management, equal opportunities, modern slavery act adherence and anti-bribery and corruption policies.

Whilst achieving Gold status may seem like a high climb for many businesses, for MVIS, it was very achievable, having already worked toward these areas for various other certifications and of course, our ISO accreditations.

Not stopping there, we have also achieved Gold status in the Supply Chain Sustainability School, a platform that offers businesses extensive training around various sustainability, offsite, digital, procurement, lean and management topics relevant to the business environment.

With a strong focus on CPD through training workshops, networking events and e-learning modules, achieving Gold status is found through completing or using a number of these tools across the company to ensure that the skills taught within the programmes are taken on by companies as well as filtered throughout the business.

As it has helped us to think about our business from top to bottom, the policies and systems affected by the work we have done with the Supply Chain Sustainability School will, in turn, affect the whole organisation in terms of helping us towards our goal a more sustainability focussed business, with the added benefits of cost savings, reinforcing our reputation and increased safety for our team, our customers and the general public.

The more we work with the School, the more it trains our team to think in certain ways.

As time goes on and we take on more accreditations and memberships with these highly valuable platforms, we are building more than just our reputation. We are changing the way we operate at an organisational level that affects how we see and approach things as a business and as individuals in an ever evolving world.

We look forward to working on new opportunities to broaden our understanding in these so we can work towards providing a better service for our customers and a better world for everyone.