Stone’s Charity Partners 2023/2024: Katharine House Hospice and Shelter

Charity is a fundamental part of our business here at Stone, a Converge Company, and 2023 has been a busy year with colleagues and teams taking part in all kinds of money-raising activities for our chosen organisations.

For 2023 and 2024 we’ve decided to dedicate our fundraising efforts to one national and one local charity and we’re hoping to raise £5,000 for each charity over the period. Our charity work forms a key part of our sustainable ethos - you can read more about our business here. 

Katharine House Hospice

The local organisation, Katharine House Hospice, provides palliative care for adults with incurable illnesses across North Oxfordshire and South Northamptonshire. Katharine House Hospice’s services are available for anyone over 18 who has an advanced life-limiting illness, and care is undertaken using a holistic approach that considers physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs.

Katharine House relies on the generosity of local people and businesses to help care for thousands of people every year. Here’s how donations, fundraising, volunteering and event participation has helped the hospice this year:

• We provided care for 815 patients.
• Our community team made 4,547 visits to patients.
• 384 patients were cared for in their homes.
• 172 patients were cared for in the hospice ward.
• There were 2,989 bed stays at the hospice.
• 30% of people went home after their stay at the hospice.
• 130 people received bereavement support.
• 69 patients received care from our Living Well day service.
• We served 9,887 meals to our patients.
• 357 physiotherapy sessions were carried out.

We’re proud to play our part in the Katharine House Hospice story. So far in 2023 our colleague Kat has shaved her head to raise money, Hayley has braved a skydive and ten team members battled through swamps and over hills on a Forest Warrior 10K run! 

The Katharine House Hospice team has visited Stone HQ to educate staff about their amazing work, and we’ve held quiz nights to raise money too. 

If you want to donate to this incredible cause, click here for our fundraising page.

Shelter

Shelter is our national charity of choice for 2023 and 2024 – because home is a human right, a foundation, and it’s where people thrive.

Despite that, millions of people are devastated by the housing emergency. Shelter exists to defend the right to a safe home for people and families across Britain and to make sure the voices of those affected by the housing emergency are heard, supporting over a million people yearly.

Shelter work in communities to understand local problems, run campaigns to fight for change on a national level, and carry out groundbreaking research to understand the UK’s housing problems – and develop policies to address the issues.

Shelter also works to address the barriers to work faced by homeless people. Shelter’s Getting Real Opportunities of Work scheme – also called GROW – is a vocational programme that provides paid employment for people who have been homeless so they can turn their lives around.

So far in 2023 our incredible colleague Pete was part of a team that cycled the 820 miles from Calais to Bilbao in seven days to support Shelter – and they succeeded despite crashes, thirty-degree heat and huge elevation changes.

We held a charity football tournament to support Shelter earlier in the year, and several of the team took part in Shelter’s Big Sleep Out with HSBC to raise money and awareness.

If you’d like to contribute to our charity efforts, here’s our fundraising page.

Making a Difference at Stone and beyond

Katharine House Hospice and Shelter are our chosen charities for 2023/2024, but they’re not the only organisations we’re proud to support.

Earlier in the year we helped raise money for the Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity by sponsoring a charity football match near to our Scottish base in Bathgate.

Our fifteen-year partnership with Family Fund is going strong and means we can help improve the lives of families raising seriously ill or disabled children, and our 2022 partnership with Destiny Rescue has helped save two children from a life of sexual slavery.

Stone is underpinned by a deep-seated commitment to charity and sustainability, and it’s helped establish us as an international leader in CSR – as our EcoVadis, Global Good and Valpak accreditations and awards demonstrate.

It can also be seen in the Making a Digital Difference framework, which collates more than 200 action points into a ten-point plan for embedding sustainability into everything we do as a business – from recycling unwanted IT and planting trees to giving employees three volunteering days per year and raising money for charity. 

As 2023 becomes 2024 we intend to keep raising money and volunteering with Katharine House Hospice and Shelter as much support as we can, and our monthly charity committee means we’ll stay on track to meet our targets.

If you’d like to learn more about our charity work, life at Stone and our business as a whole, please follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.