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Community outreach projects with local schools showcases sustainability and safety

MVIS work in their local community stretches far and wide. Sponsoring sports teams, combat athletes and providing work experience opportunities for local young people are just a part of what they do to give back. Additionally, the company often reach out into their local schools and work with the children on a wide variety of projects.

Recently, MVIS teamed up with Highfields High School, and specifically, their Year 8 and 9 children to set up two challenging, intriguing tasks.

Firstly, Year 8 children were tasked with a safety initiative. The children were briefed on site safety and its importance then were set the challenge of developing a new safety idea that could be adopted on sites nationwide.

The children identified ‘Hat before that’, a safety initiative aimed at driving all on construction and highways sites to think about wearing a hard hat before carrying out any task.

Anne Ashman, General Manager of MVIS told us:

“It was very clever of the Year 8’s to think of this. Whilst we all know about the importance of PPE when on site, the children highlighted that all visitors generally will have to report to a reception or site office and even this journey can encounter possible risk on some sites.

“So, their solution was to have safety focused around hard hat wearing when arriving to the site to eradicate some risks in that first entry. Ideas that were discussed were an intercom + escort system where the site office brings out hard hats to arriving people to make sure they enter wearing one and then escorting them to vehicles as they leave to cover the reverse journey upon leaving.”

Highfields’ Year 9 children were informed of Bartco UK’s decision to foray into VMS hire across International markets and were tasked with discovering ways in which Bartco can stand out from the crowd in a new market.

The Year 9 school children developed an idea around sustainability and in addition to MVIS signs carrying essential highways and journey time information, they could also be utilised sustainably using solar power to preach sustainability across France.

The children focused on programming MVIS VMS signs with messages surrounding anti-pollution and climate change in order to become more than ‘just road signs’ for the French market.

Upon Year 9’s ideas, Anne continued:

“This really impressed us, as these are key issues within our sector and indeed, globally. Carbon footprint, climate change and environmental concerns are at the forefront of the evolution of so many company strategies going forward as the pressure builds to go greener. We’re in a position that we can use very environmentally friendly solutions to spread that word, literally put it in the faces of people and make it a part of everyday life.

“We thought this was a very forward-thinking approach from the children and reflected fantastically on Highfields school that their students are so vigilant of these worldwide issues.”