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Sustainability
Community Day
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Community Day is our longest-running and most popular Foundation programme, celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2005. Through this programme, Lend Lease employees around the world are invited to take time out to volunteer in their community. During the 2007 Community Day we have been able to assist a variety of community groups and charities supporting homeless people, disabled groups, aged care facilities, shelters for abused women and children, local schools, breast cancer and the environment.
To date, we estimate our people have volunteered more than 120,000 hours of their time to community initiatives. Often we bring our construction knowledge to help build community gardens, kindergarten cubbies though we also offer to help simply paint or tidy community facilities. Beneficiaries typically include socially or economically deprived groups aged citizens, children, the homeless and people with disabilities.
Community Day has enabled us to develop strong relationships with the community groups we support (chosen by our people), many of whom now specifically plan tasks with our help in mind. In addition to community giving, we have found the day to be a great opportunity for camaraderie and team building within Lend Lease. Every year, around 4,000 Lend Lease employees from 18 countries give their time to more than 200 Community Day projects. Over the last 10 years, that equates to about 140,000 hours. These are a few of the examples:
Singapore
Staff worked with contractors to develop an educational garden for the Singapore School for the Deaf and refurbish the school library. This project had a positive educational focus and involved planting fruit trees, vegetables and herb plants, installing a micro-ecological fishpond, and providing new illustration books for the library collection.
London
A London team joined forces with an existing group of community volunteers and children to resurrect a much needed recreational playground facility in the Springfield Community, located in the heart of a large, densely populated, multi-ethnic and economically disadvantaged council housing estate. This project involved community collaboration to fast-track local efforts to provide a safe recreational area for local children and was built with the innovative use of recycled materials. One of the volunteers on the project says: “I met some of the kids who will use the playground. This made me think about how fortunate I am, but also gave me a feeling of guilt - one day helping out on a project is not saintly at all. I did a bit of self-discovering whilst painting the side of a Portakabin (badly at that)! I have decided to get more involved with this particular project by doing some voluntary work once the playground is opened.”
Los Angeles
The Bovis Lend Lease team in Los Angeles was involved in a number of local projects throughout Southern California. One of these was the construction of four, approximately 111 square metre houses in Glendale, California in collaboration with The Glendale Habitat for Humanity. The homes, which were built with donated materials, will be sold to qualified low-income families as part of a wider low-income housing programme.
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