Zurich Community Trust supports QAC during their 2021 Festive Challenge

The Zurich Community Trust offers an inspiring range of grant-making, fundraising and volunteering programmes and QAC has been part of their ‘Challenge Programme’ since 2016. The Challenge Programme offers employees opportunities to volunteer with charities and causes in a number of ways, getting them out of their usual team environment and into something new.

Prior to Covid, we loved having volunteer teams out to College, and Umberslade, as part of their Summer and Winter challenges to help complete a range of activities from gardening and painting, to working with students. However, since Covid, the remit changed and all challenges needed to be done virtually – making it very different for everyone involved.

Still wanting to be part of it, we thought Zurich teams might want to play ‘Secret Santa’, so we gave them access to our Amazon Wishlist, featuring items that would benefit students across College. The first Zurich Santas took part in the challenge in December 2020, donating £500 worth of items including sensory toys, books, games and speech and language tools.

Following the success and excitement of 2020, and the continued need for volunteer challenges to be virtual, we were really pleased to be invited to take part in the Winter 2021 challenge, again hoping our Amazon Wishlist would inspire people to get involved and support us. 

We were not disappointed as another team, this time the Zurich UK Executive Team chose QAC as their charity to support and were given £500 to spend on items. After reading about QAC and the work we do though, the team took it on themselves to do some fundraising of their own and raised a further £870 to spend, meaning we received a bumper delivery of goodies worth over £1200.

The Fundraising office was inundated with Amazon parcels overs a number of days and had great fun opening them all and sorting through everything, seeing what the team had bought, including sensory and mentoring tools, art and craft supplies, books for our library and Citizenship teams and equipment for our Community Services Hub.

On behalf QAC students and staff, we would like to say a huge thank you to Zurich Community Trust for allowing us to be part of their Challenge programme each year, and to the Zurich UK Executive Team for playing Santa for us this year!