Community investment in Germany: Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich
Job coaching for young people without apprenticeships and work experience
Volunteers from our offices in Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt provide job coaching to 15-17-year-old adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds with poor qualifications and a long history of discouraging experiences. Volunteers help with CVs and application letters, and practise interview skills with the students. This provides the students with a unique learning experience and access to successful role models and positive feedback; while our volunteers benefit from the opportunity to expand their own skills.
In 2008, our office in Frankfurt along with Citi, Deutsche Börse, Fidelity and Linklaters, played host to 60 students from five schools, helping to prepare them for the next stage in their lives.
Our offices in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Munich offered one-day work experiences to students from various schools as part of a scheme organised by the charity Schüler helfen Leben, which works with children and adolescents in south-eastern Europe to secure peace.
Reading in schools
Popular reading partner projects have been established with schools in Berlin and Frankfurt. Cologne is currently planning its own project with a nursery school. These projects are designed to improve language skills in young children who speak German as a second language. Since 2004, volunteers have also read at the annual Children's and Adolescent Book Fair in Frankfurt. We offer our employees workshops on creative reading to enhance the experience for the children and in recognition of the volunteers' dedication to the programme.
In Frankfurt, volunteers are now also offering extracurricular workshops (with experiments and creative work) focusing on topics such as electricity.
Team challenges
Since 2004, all six German offices have supported clothing collections for local homeless charities and abused women's shelters.
Our offices also work with the Wishing Tree project on a scheme that gives Christmas presents to orphans; children living in abused women's shelters (Frankfurt); children with cancer (Cologne); and young refugees (Berlin). Christmas trees decorated with the children's wishlists are put up in the reception areas of the offices so that volunteers can fulfil the wishes.
For three years we have been buying handmade Christmas cards from our long-standing Hamburg community partner helping to raise funds for the charity. To honour our commitment to the environment, in 2008 we offered these cards as e-cards as well.
As part of our firm's long-standing partnership with Habitat for Humanity – a charity that aims to tackle poverty housing – 31 employees from our German offices participated in housebuilds in Ghana and fundraising activities in 2008, and another team is going in 2009.
Our offices regularly sponsor runners for charity runs. Examples in 2008 included a team of 20 participating in a charity run in Hamburg, and 35 people from our Berlin office raising funds for a children's home. For the second year, volunteers from our offices in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt formed a team, this time running a half-marathon in Cologne.
Many of our offices also organise regular blood donations for the Red Cross.
Community Challenge
Following the success of our October 2007 team challenges, which involved 163 participants, in 2008 we organised 21 projects, many of them together with the partner organisations from the previous year. Overall, 21 per cent of our employees in Germany participated in one or more projects in 2008.
In Berlin, volunteers served food to homeless people, did some gardening in a homeless shelter, painted rooms in an orphanage, and participated in a games and handicrafts afternoon with children.
Our Cologne office took children from a kindergarten and an orphanage to the zoo and the circus.
Volunteers from Düsseldorf spent a day with groups of children from an orphanage taking them ice-skating, to an indoor playground and to a farm, and they also supported a beauty day for homeless young women again.
Frankfurt took part in several projects: redecorating an assisted-living home for former substance abusers; job coaching for homeless people; job coaching for young women living in assisted housing; serving food at a Thanksgiving party for homeless people; accompanying women and children from a women's refuge to a theme park; and spending a creative afternoon filled with reading and experiments in a local primary school. Lawyers also offered pro bono legal advice to adolescents in a youth centre.
Associates and trainees in Hamburg offered pro bono legal advice to adolescents, while other volunteers redecorated the rooms of one of our partner charities.
In Munich, our volunteers repainted the walls in a day-nursery.
Markets
Our offices in Cologne and Düsseldorf regularly participate in Marktplatz für gute Geschäfte -– events that bring together charities and local businesses to sign contracts for corporate volunteering and other non-financial support.