Social Value is always at the top of our agenda with the Eric Wright Group being wholly owned by the Eric Wright Charitable Trust. Each year, the Trust donate in excess of £1.8 million across a number of sectors aligned with our business model including the elderly, carers, youth zones, education and training and more recently mental health and child and family support.
At the start of the Pandemic, it was obvious to our site project teams that we would need to support our local communities, not only in continuing to deliver important infrastructure and new build projects, but diversely by reaching out to the people within the communities in which we were working who needed that extra support.
The teams on both Atelier in Salford, being delivered for English Cities Fund and Muse Developments, and New Little Mill in Ancoats being delivered for Manchester Life Development Company, absolutely went above and beyond and looked to provide additional support in a number of ways. The team linked into a local church, a local school in Salford and also supported local school pupils through our Career Ambassador’s programme. Processes were inevitably slower than envisaged due to the constraints of COVID-19 and once schools started to return our Ambassadors worked hard to deliver in new ways. We all had to embrace the new normal but this would not be at the detriment of the local communities in which we were working.
The Church of the Resurrection and St Barnabas, due to COVID-19 had an increase in numbers accessing their services and desperately needed their flooring replacing so they approached us to ask if we could help. Together with our waste management company, Kenny Waste Management, and our flooring subcontractor, Phoenix Flooring, our New Little Mill project team set to work and in just 5 days the church flooring had been transformed.
Download the case study for the full story: Church of the Resurrection and St Barnabas Case Study
The next project we focused on was a local mural that had been vandalised leaving the students of St Phillip’s CE Primary really upset and angry. The pupils had helped create the mural as part of an art project with local community groups and Islington residents back in 2015. So again, Eric Wright Construction’s Atelier project team stepped in and are working hard to renovate and replace parts of the artwork. The full story can be viewed here: Atelier Mural Story by Manchester Evening News
Finally, on the return of the children to school following a period of lockdown, we again linked up with St Phillip’s Primary School to understand how we could deliver our career programme with them using our trained ambassadors. The activity was going to be the same but just delivered in a new way, via Zoom on a 6 hour call. We engaged with Year 6 and Key Worker children, working within each of the bubbles to ultimately deliver a ‘Giant Tetrahedron’, an activity which would normally be delivered face to face. The pupils and staff were delighted that we could continue to deliver these activities and we have gone on to deliver many more sessions via Zoom across our live projects.
Commenting on the activity, primary teacher, Mr Davies, said: “Wow! What a brilliant experience we have all had today. Thank you to everyone at Eric Wright! The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves and worked really well as a team. The final tetrahedron was amazing and it was brilliant that we could all work together whilst in separate bubbles”.
