Lizzie Hill

Our Commitment to Fundraising for St Mungo’s

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Since joining forces with St Mungo’s, we’ve led an amalgamation of work to support ending homelessness. This has included volunteering, training, collaborative events, but also and crucially, fundraising. To continue to provide their much-needed services and put an end to homelessness, vital funds are needed. This makes fundraising for St Mungo’s an important part of our partnership.

We’ve committed to raising £5000 for St Mungo’s this year through donations, and are a third of the way there since announcing our partnership in July.

While we believe that giving our time and expertise to our charity partner is invaluable, it’s so important to raise sufficient funds that can really help and make a difference. These often go towards vital resources and services that provide support and help people to move away from rough sleeping.

ArcelorMittal Orbit Abseil

We’ve been thinking outside of the box in terms of fundraising events. Our brave and inspiring teams have gone above and beyond to raise money, including abseiling off of the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London from 262ft. Our colleagues tackled the challenge head-on on 2nd June 2023, raising £920 from this event alone.

Take the Lead

Our August challenge, ‘Take the Lead’ saw some of our Regular Cleaning mascots take on the distance of a sponsored marathon (26 miles) or an ultra-marathon (50 miles) throughout the month of August. Pixie alone (left) raised £125, earning a St Mungo’s bandana to wear on walks.

Football Event

Our charity football game on 15th September, saw twelve teams taking part in a tournament to raise money and awareness for the homelessness charity. This event was a huge success, with many of our clients and partners forming teams to collaboratively support this cause.

Events like this one not only raise funds to support homelessness, but also raise awareness. Collaborative events like this one inspire conversations and knowledge sharing around the issues surrounding homlessness in the UK. This can lead to even more people getting involved and working together to end rough sleeping.

Upcoming Events

We’ve got a variety of projects and events planned for the Christmas period to continue our commitment to fundraising for St Mungo’s. Since 2018, we have committed to volunteering and fundraising events over the period.

Some of the events planned this year include cooking meals, decorating some of St Mungo’s services and a Christmas gift appeal to give our colleagues the chance to donate gifts that we’ve wrapped up together. To start the new year right, we also have a London Winter Walk planned in January to bring our fundraising efforts straight into 2024.

Round Up: Reflecting on Thank Your Cleaner Day 2023

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We’re reflecting on Thank Your Cleaner Day and the feedback we’ve received.

As October came to a close, we took a moment to look back at this year’s celebration of Thank Your Cleaner Day. We want to reflect on the feedback we’ve received from colleagues and how this has initiated important conversations around our benefits and rewards.

Thank Your Cleaner Day is a celebration of the hard work that cleaning teams do to contribute to business success. Their often invisible role is vital in maintaining clean, healthy, and inspiring environments that are ready to use each day.

This year, we aligned Thank Your Cleaner Day with our core value to ‘Make a Difference’ for our colleagues. This day let us spend some time with our valued cleaning colleagues and celebrate their ongoing hard work. We seized this opportunity to engage with our cleaning teams, explain our benefits package, and most importantly, listen to their feedback.

Our aim was to understand how our colleagues are utilising our benefits and how we can enhance awareness and relevance. By taking the time to listen to the challenges our colleagues face in their work, we’re working on strategies to better support them and make improvements.

We’ve had some truly inspiring conversations with colleagues and received an outpouring of support and feedback. We’re now taking steps to change and enhance our colleague rewards as a result of their input. Our priority is that all teams feel valued at work, with rewards and benefits that are relevant to them.

We’re incredibly proud to see our values in action every day, and we’re committed to continually supporting our colleagues. Thank you to our remarkable cleaning teams for all that you do. Together, we’re building a brighter and more sustainable future.

Sustainable Water Bottles By Made Blue

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Made Blue Foundation is a not-for-profit charitable organisation providing clean drinking water to communities in need.

Creating better places is thirsty work. That’s why we choose to work with Made Blue Foundation, a charity on a mission to deliver clean drinking water to communities around the globe. By purchasing their sustainable water bottles, we are able to contribute to this mission.

Through the sale of sustainable products and services, Made Blue can invest in worldwide water projects that change lives. These projects generate access to clean drinking water in the places on earth where it’s needed most. This helps to create better places in a sustainable and entrepreneurial way. 

Sustainable Water Bottles

We’ve been handing out some of Made Blue Foundation’s sustainable water bottles as gifts at charity events, colleague appreciation days, sustainability events, and to our valued partners.

These environmentally friendly bottles are recyclable, reusable and dishwasher safe, helping to put an end to packaged water. With more than 4kg of plastic waste avoided, this is such a brilliant alternative to the usual throwaway plastic bottle. The bottles are also made from indestructible Tritan, making them clear, sturdy and unbreakable, while making refilling easy.

Creating Better Places

In true Regular Cleaning spirit, these bottles also deliver positive social value to communities in need.

For each bottle we purchase, Made Blue provides 500 litres of clean drinking water to a community that lacks access to this. This equates to one child from a developing country having access to clean drinking water and hygiene for six months or more.

In October alone, we handed out almost 1000 charity bottles. That’s closing in on half a million litres of water donated by us on behalf of our colleagues. 771,000,000 people globally live without access to clean water.

It’s this that makes water projects like this so vital. By gifting our colleagues and partners with these sustainable bottles, we can make a real difference in people’s lives. This is such an amazing impact to see and supports our sustainable business strategy to create better places.

It’s brilliant to see organisations working together towards a better future, and we’re thrilled to be able to give these bottles out and have a positive social impact. A simple way to show our thanks, while supporting our sustainability targets and reducing the use of single-use plastic bottles.

Black History Month at Regular Cleaning

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We’ve been looking at inspirational poems and people this Black History Month.

To celebrate Black History Month at Regular Cleaning, we’ve been sharing some inspirational poems of people throughout history. These have been showing on the TV screens in our Service Support Centre each week to highlight the importance of this month.

We’ve also been getting together to share food from different cultures as a way to celebrate. This has included some West African inspired food from Nigeria, as well as dishes from Jamaica and other Caribbean countries. We know how powerful food can be to represent different cultures and bring people together, and it was great to get our teams together over a variety of cuisines from around the world.

Black History Month lets us recognise and celebrate invaluable individuals from around the globe. A month observing courage, rich cultures and diverse communities, this is an important time to honour the struggles and triumphs of people.

At Regular Cleaning, we celebrate diversity and encourage the celebration of different cultures. We care about creating a sense of community, and somewhere that people from different backgrounds can feel included and appreciated. It’s our goal to create better places and that means spaces that are diverse and kind.

We’ve spent this month learning about some of the important messages that have come out of this rich history. This is a good time to celebrate and learn about other cultures, but also to have important conversations around race.

Let’s take a look at our inspiration poems and people from this month:

  1. Fredrick Douglass by Robert Hayden

2. Five Haikus by Richard Wright

3. [up from the slobbery] by Harryette Mullen

4. Canary by Rita Dove

Supporting St. Mungo’s Digital Inclusion Programme

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Sharing knowledge to better the prospects of others.

As part of our partnership with St. Mungo’s homelessness charity, we were recently invited to support their Digital Inclusion Team at one of their Community Hubs. Here, they provide training for those in their care who are keen to learn digital skills. This includes equipping clients with the skills which most of us have learnt as technology advances

Some of our team volunteered to run an Email Workshop for the Hub, joined by some St Mungo’s facilitators. The session was a huge success, seeing several St Mungo’s clients joining and running for most of the afternoon.

The nature of these sessions means that we can interact with clients directly, with participation both online and in person.

While there were differing levels of knowledge amongst the group, it was amazing to see interaction with the session. We were thrilled to see that clients were interested in what we had been asked to teach.

Homelessness is a complex issue, and often reading about the challenges or issues homelessness causes paints a simpler picture than reality. Meeting and hearing from clients directly in this session, we saw first hand how rewarding it is to have help them learn new skills. The success of the session and positive engagement meant that we left feeling warm and positive.

The session gave us an insight into the struggles of someone experiencing homelessness and let us understand a fraction of the challenges that clients may face in their recovery.

It was clear that St Mungo’s play a vital role in helping clients to achieve success. From providing accommodation to offering training, St Mungo’s provides clients with better prospects. This can help to support clients as they prepare for the world of work, training or education.

We live and breathe our company values every day. It’s this kind of personal service that allows us to make positive impacts to society.

We care about having a positive long-term legacy. This means caring for the community, and improving livelihoods.

Pampering Event with St Mungo’s

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We sent our volunteers to a women’s only service to host a pampering day.

We know just how important self-care is. It’s vital to take time out for wellbeing and this pampering event with St Mungo’s let us treat their clients to exactly that. We went to a women’s only accommodation service in London to host a day of relaxation with special pamper treats. The aim was to host a fun and social afternoon promoting rejuvenation and empowerment.

Everyone deserves to feel special and pampered. Our team provided a number of spa-themed treats throughout the day to create a fun atmosphere with luxurious treats. This featured a range of refreshing face masks to revitalise the skin, including cucumber, clay, and a manuka honey mask.

Our nail station let clients sit back and relax as they had their hands pampered. They enjoyed some nail shaping and painting, as well as hand masks and massages. With music playing, snacks to enjoy and soft drinks to sip on, this felt like a really special event. We wanted to recreate the feel of a salon with added spa-themed fun and socialising.

A rack of lovely clothes were donated for the clients to browse and keep if they chose to. These featured a mixture of styles and items, with casual-wear, plus some more glamorous options to choose from. Items included dresses, skirts, jackets, trousers, and tops, giving the ladies a wide selection to browse. It was brilliant to see how popular this was, with everyone choosing some items to take away with them.

Making a Difference

At Regular Cleaning, we care about making a difference in society and that means caring about the wellbeing of our communities.

The event aimed to provide a fun, social and relaxing day for those that came along. It can be so empowering to enjoy a spot of self-care, promoting wellbeing and confidence. We wanted to host a memorable day that would make every woman feel confident. It’s so important to ensure that people feel supported and cherished in their day to day life, and it’s events like this that can help to achieve this.

We received some amazing feedback from this pampering event with St Mungo’s, with clients saying how much they enjoyed the day. We’re thrilled that through our partnership we can host events like this, and we can’t wait to host another similar pamper day in the future!