Giving back with AdaptaKind
At The Adaptavist Group, we strive to make corporate social responsibility an integral part of our business practices and social fabric.
We believe in giving back to the community and enabling all our employees to make a positive impact on society, and we've been involved in philanthropic and community activities since our earliest days. When we were just a handful of people, our team in London took part in Odyssians Camp, an activity holiday camp for people with all kinds of disabilities. Our small team had a great time supporting and cheering on the camp participants, and were keen to find more opportunities to give back in future.
We've grown considerably since then and have expanded our efforts globally, hoping to create a lasting impact by supporting causes that align with our expertise and focusing on three core pillars of education, community, and sustainability. Our work towards this aim is through a number of initiatives and partnerships that we have collectively termed 'AdaptaKind'.
Our Pledge 1% commitment
In 2015, we became a proud participant of the Pledge 1% global philanthropy movement, encouraging companies to commit 1% of their time, equity, product, and profit to support nonprofit organisations and give back to the community. By actively participating in the Pledge 1% movement, The Adaptavist Group aims to exemplify the values we hold as an organisation and foster a culture of social responsibility that threads into our activities across the business. Our global team has embraced this pledge over the years, dedicating funding, products, and resources to make a difference.
A recent initiative, led by a UK-based team of volunteers from The Group in 2023, involved driving two trucks full of equipment and supplies to the Poland-Ukraine border so that our colleagues in Ukraine could distribute aid to their local communities. At the end of 2023, we also built Pledge 1% activities into our global End of Year Conferences, with teams assembling wheelchairs for children with Cerebral Palsy in Malaysia, building and painting toy cars for vulnerable children in Greece, and creating backpacks full of essential items to support schools and child welfare in Mexico.
Empowering our teams to support the causes they believe in
In 2023, we also launched our AdaptaKind internal platform to encourage and facilitate more grassroots participation in volunteering and charitable giving. The platform is available to every employee of The Group, providing a central hub to find and track volunteer work, organise group fundraising efforts, and make individual donations to causes of their choice. In addition, every employee donation is matched by The Group up to £1,000, or the local currency equivalent, per person. In providing this fund matching, we can amplify the impact of individual contributions, and we actively encourage our people to participate.
Our charity partnerships
Beyond our day-to-day, we also continuously seek to identify opportunities for collaboration and engagement with nonprofit and charity partners to drive positive change. We're proud to be partnered with organisations that sustainably support the development of children and young people in some of the world's poorest countries, and as a result, improve their communities, gender equality, and economies for the future.
Ascent Soccer
Ascent Soccer is a social impact organisation based in Malawi, providing comprehensive education to young people alongside world-class football coaching to open up opportunities for them and their communities.
The Adaptavist Group has been an Ascent Soccer pillar partner since 2022, pledging $150,000 USD in support for 2022 and 2023. We also hosted charity poker nights in 2023 that raised over $70,000 USD, helping Ascent develop The Green Leadership Academy, a pioneering full-time residential school, environmental education centre, and equitable youth soccer academy. The Academy is a first for Southeast Africa and will open in Spring 2024 with a mission to teach students how to listen, learn, and lead in a changing world, while supporting their academic progress and an understanding of how to build a healthier, cleaner, and more sustainable future.
We hope to build on the success of our fundraising poker nights in 2024 with events coming up in London, Germany, and Toronto; however, it is important to us that the support we provide to our charity partners is not purely financial. Throughout 2023, a group of our employees also delivered a web development course to Ascent Soccer students, which was the first coding course of its kind in Malawi, and we look forward to working together on similar education initiatives in future.
United World Schools
United World Schools, also known as UWS, is an organisation on a mission to reduce poverty and gender inequality globally by improving access to quality education in remote and marginalised communities, where children often do not regularly attend school. As well as building new schools, UWS also provides training for teachers, with the goal that the education systems they support will be self-sufficient long beyond UWS's initial involvement.
As a new partner of UWS, funding from The Adaptavist Group in 2024 will help to educate 554 children for an academic year, train and employ 22 teachers, and support 227 girls through targeted interventions, including mothers' groups, girls' clubs, and evening classes for girls, to help redress the balance of gender inequality.
As with our Ascent Soccer partnership, we hope to further UWS' mission by truly working together, not simply providing sponsorship, and as such, we are also looking into using our tech capabilities to enhance their digital teacher training and website development for maximum impact.