This UK Volunteers’ Week, we are pleased to launch the first in a new series of Ince Impact podcasts about CSR at Ince. In this first podcast, Ince CSR committee members Donal Keaney, Francesca Jus-Burke, Alex Davidson and Rachel Bennion, provide an overview of CSR at Ince and give an insight into the types of projects that our volunteers have been involved with over the past few months. Thank you to the CSR Committee, Ince’s volunteers and Ince’s charity partners for making all this possible. Stay tuned for the next podcast in two months’ time.
This UK Volunteers’ Week, we are pleased to launch the first in a new series of Ince Impact podcasts about CSR at Ince. In this first podcast, Ince CSR committee members Donal Keaney, Francesca Jus-Burke, Alex Davidson and Rachel Bennion, provide an overview of CSR at Ince and give an insight into the types of projects that our volunteers have been involved with over the past few months. Thank you to the CSR Committee, Ince’s volunteers and Ince’s charity partners for making all this possible. Stay tuned for the next podcast in two months’ time.
0:08
Hello, everyone. And welcome to the CSR podcast. My name is Francesca Jus-Burke, I am an associate in the London corporate team and a co-founder of Ince Impact, the CSRCommitteefor Ince's UK offices. With me today to talk about Ince impact and the firms CSR activities are fellow Ince Impact colleagues from the London Office, Donal Keaney, Rachel Bennion and Alex Davidson who are going to introduce themselves next.
0:38
Hello, my name is Donald Keaney, I'm a Senior Marine Manager in the shipping team.
0:44
Hi, my name is Rachel Bennion. I'm full Seat Training and I'm currently in the Employment Department.
0:50
Hi, I'm Alex Davidson and I'm an associate in the London office. Thanks, guys. Rachel, why don't you tell us a little bit about what the Ince Impact committee does.
1:01
Yes, of course, so the committee co-ordinates CSR activities at Ince. We liaise with external organizations and work with them to arrange CSR activities. This involves promoting sessions internally, recruiting Ince volunteers to take part, and coordinating all the logistics from the inside. In addition to that, we also liaise with our CSR network overseas. Thanks Rachel, Donal can you tell us about the types of CSR initiatives we organize and take part in on a regular basis?
1:35
We have organized a variety of different activities.
1:38
one ongoing activity is the mentoring program, which is facilitated by Elba, a number of our colleagues, volunteered for this scheme and they have been paired with mentees from a local school in the East London area and they meet regularly with these mentees to provide them with guidance with counseling, with their studies in their career.
2:01
And for those who want to become lawyers, advice on how best to achieve this, we also take part in the befriending call scheme. The scheme was set up by Elba in 2020 shortly after the first lockdown was initiated. And through this scheme, are volunteers take part in regular calls with elderly people in the East London area?
2:23
Most of these people will be isolated, obviously, they've become even more isolated lately with the various lockdowns. This gives them a wonderful opportunity to talk to somebody from the outside world, and I can tell you that all of our volunteers who take part in this scheme, give us very, very positive feedback.
2:41
We also provide volunteers for the Tower Hamlets Law Center.
2:45
Our volunteers take part in the immigration clinics, whereby they take part in calls with people from East London who have immigration issues, that need to be addressed. Those volunteers come from across our firm. They're not just immigration lawyers, but of course, we have integration specialists who address those problems.
3:05
So we have, that's just a snapshot of some of the ongoing screens.
3:09
Thanks, Donal, Alex, can you tell us about the types of charities we work for? I know Donal, mentioned a few then, but can you elaborate?
3:17
Yeah, absolutely, so we work mainly with local charities, Tower Hamlets Law Centre which Donal touched on there, is one of the major ones once every two weeks, We send off a cohort of volunteers for that one. We also work closely with the East London Business Alliance, Elba, they put on a variety of schemes ranging from sort of mentoring through two insight days for university students. Finally, we work with the Spitalfields city farm, which is a small city farm a few hundred meters by building in London. And we attend on corporate days, sending a team of 10 people to help out in the field. And it's all very wholesome.
3:53
Thanks, Alex. So I'm going to talk to you now about recent volunteering events that we were involved with. Rachel, Can you tell me about the CV review session that took place in March?
4:04
Yes. So this is a session that we hosted on the 12th of March as part of Elba's Everyone's Business Projects. We had Beatrice Russ, Donal Keaneyand Shannon Ryan from the London office, and they were joined by Jenna Harris from Llanmaes for the event, which, of course, took place virtually. The everyone's business project aims to tackle youth violence, knife, crime, and unemployment. During the session, our volunteers reviewed the CVs of Elba's clients and provided some really useful feedback on the content and the format. They also provided guidance on how to write an effective cover letter.
4:41
Many of the projects, clients may not have significant experience in the job market or have had any access to guidance and career services previously, so they find this particular service, very valuable.
4:52
Thanks, Rachel. Donal, could you please tell us about the mock interview session that also took place at the end of March?
5:00
Sure, This session was a follow-up to the CV review session that Rachel just mentioned.
5:06
Ince volunteers, Beatrice Russ, Benedict McGuire, Holly Manners, Jenna Harris and Shannon Ryan attended this session and were joined in the online session by four candidates.
5:20
These candidates all were in the job market, and a lot of them actually had interviews lined up. And the Ince volunteers were assigned to breakout rooms with candidates where they conducted short interviews and then provided them with constructive feedback on their performance.
5:35
Reports are that all of the candidates were very grateful for the interview tips provided by the Incevolunteers.
5:40
They all said that they were ready to step forward into the world job interviews following the session.
5:44
That's good to hear, Thanks, Donal. So you've heard a snapshot of the events that took place over the last two months, going to ask Alex to tell us about what is coming up in the next few months.
5:56
Thanks, Francesca. So, on top of the standard sort of sweeter events, which will be the insight days and the mentoring and the second thing, we also have the London Legal Walk coming up towards the back end of summer. And there's also events lined up with the Spitalfields city farm that I mentioned earlier.
6:13
So although the people going in, team building and also helping out.
6:17
I don't know. Do you have anything to add on that front?
6:20
Yes, we have another wonderful event coming up very soon, another interview session. This time it's through the Tower project.
6:26
And the service uses the clients of the tower project.
6:30
For this session are all young adults with learning difficulties. And the interview session is designed to give these people a chance to practice their interview skills and to get some tips from volunteers, all of whom are naturally being employees at Ince will have attended an interview at some point in their lives on how best to conduct themselves an interview.
6:49
So it's a fantastic session and we're looking forward very much to us. I look forward to talking to everybody about that in the next edition of this podcast. So thanks everybody for listening. Thank you to Alex, Rachel, and Donal of course, for volunteering their time and explaining, talking about the great projects that Ince has been running in the past few months and we look forward to speaking to you again in two months' time. Thank you.