Practice Plan sales and marketing director, Nigel Jones, caught up with Jess Wilkes-Ball to discuss how the Wesleyan Foundation has given millions of pounds to help charitable causes all over the UK.
NJ: Hi Jess, can you tell me a bit about how the Wesleyan Foundation was created?
JW-B: We had a successful charity partnership with Birmingham Children’s Hospital which raised over £1 million to help with the creation of an incredible bereavement centre, however it got to the point where we knew we could make a massive impact in another way. We have a mutual rewards package that provides members with a range of different benefits and we felt that opening a charitable foundation would be a great way of supporting the causes that matter most to our members.
We put £500,000 into it in the first year and the uptake was hugely successful, so we then made a commitment of £1 million a year and so far, we have donated £3.5 million to help over 100,000 people across the UK. We help small and large organisations and we are having a massive impact not just on the communities where our staff live, but also where our customers live.
NJ: Can you give us an example of the projects you have supported?
JW-B: Around £1 million has gone to educational charities, and one specific donation of £10,000 went to fund a homework club at a Northern Irish school. It has allowed the school to help youngsters with basics such as stationery to do their homework, something many people take for granted.
We’ve been able to great work with our medical and dental colleagues, and recently we assisted Town Hall Dental Foundation in Yorkshire to purchase a vehicle that will allow them to visit vulnerable people and women fleeing violence, to give them dental treatment.
The smallest grant went to a baby bank network in Bristol, an organisation that takes in equipment mothers don’t need anymore to donate to others. Our £568 donation helped them to PAT test all the appliances.
We support a lot of food banks, and we donated to a cool educational project that taught school children about DNA sequencing in animals.
In just those few examples above, you can get an idea of the range of causes that we support.
NJ: How are the grants given out and who makes the decisions?
JW-B: We have a grants panel made up of individuals from across our business, including yourself Nigel, and we look at the applications against the criteria and then have to make a lot of tough decisions.
There are times where we will look at an application and decide that we can’t fund them this time, but we want them to re-apply in the future. If that is the case, then what we look to do is give guidance to that organisation to help them in their next attempt.
We have a small and large grants programme, and we are able to turn around the small applications in just a few days. If someone comes to us for a grant of a few hundred pounds, we have a system to fully check it before getting the money to them within a week, and that is something we pride ourselves on.
NJ: So, how can people get in touch and make an application?
JW-B: If people want to make an application for one of our grants, what they need to do is go to wesleyanfoundation.co.uk and click on the ‘apply for a grant’ tab. Alternatively, if you want to get in touch and hear more about our work or just start a conversation, you can do so by emailing me on foundation@wesleyan.co.uk
NJ: Thanks for your time Jess, it’s much appreciated.
About Nigel
Nigel is the sales and marketing director at Practice Plan. He also sits on the grants panel for the Wesleyan Foundation
About Jess
Jess is the social responsibility lead for Wesleyan and chair of the Wesleyan Grants Panel.