Horatio’s Garden are delighted to have been selected by PwC as one of their charity partners in Cardiff for the next twelve months.
Being based just a few miles away from Horatio’s Garden Wales, with almost 500 staff located there, we hope that our partnership will help to make a massive difference in the lives of our beneficiaries from across the whole of Wales.
Wendy Edwards, People Director at PwC Cardiff, had the following to say about their plans for the PwC Cardiff partnership with Horatio’s Garden Wales:
“The team here are so excited to be working with Horatio’s Garden this year. It’s a charity that we are very passionate about and we are really hoping to help them achieve great things throughout the year.
As well as helping to raise money to support the charity, we are really looking forward to giving our colleagues the chance to take a moment away from their day jobs and do something purposeful by volunteering with the charity. As a firm, we are dedicated to enabling our people to devote time to charity projects, particularly when it comes to supporting amazing charities like Horatio’s Garden, which are right on our doorstep and having such an obvious impact.
We are delighted to have the opportunity to help out in the garden.”
As part of PwC’s companywide volunteering initiative ‘One Firm, One Day,’ thousands of staff across the country devoted their time to charity projects this May.
This included a wonderful team of ten from the company’s Cardiff office, who helped to get our partnership off to a great start by visiting Horatio’s Garden Wales on Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Day on Friday 19th May. Together, they visited the garden to lend a helping hand with various ongoing projects that Head Gardener Owen Griffiths and the garden’s brilliant volunteer team have been working on.
Everyone spent a very sunny afternoon clearing an area around Ty-Hyfryd, a step-down rehabilitation bungalow adjacent at Horatio’s Garden Wales that is often used by patients and their families in the weeks before they are discharged home from hospital.
Arriving with wellies and their own garden forks, the PwC Cardiff team spent several hours weeding, breaking ground, and clearing waste with great enthusiasm! After gardening with gusto, the team joined Head Gardener Owen and the charity’s volunteers for a tour of Horatio’s Garden Wales, finding out a bit more about daily life in the garden and how their work supports patients throughout their rehabilitation after spinal injury.
At the end of a hard day’s work, the team they were amazed with their results remarking that it was “wonderful to see something come together out of nothing.”
With the team made up of colleagues from different departments across the firm, they all shared that it had been a lovely opportunity to get together outside the office. Everyone enjoyed really connecting with their colleagues and getting to know them as people, whilst doing something positive and impactful that is totally different from their day jobs.
Each member of PwC’s staff gets up to six days a year of volunteering time to spend supporting their charity partners and we have it on good authority that most of the team will be back supporting Horatio’s Garden with their newfound skills soon!
PwC’s support will go much further than volunteering, with their team keen to raise as much money and awareness as possible to help keep Horatio’s Garden Wales thriving.
Already a few members of the firm’s newly formed running club have signed up to take on the upcoming Cardiff Half Marathon and they have plenty of other ideas to help capture their colleagues’ interest too, including bake sales, quizzes, a treasure hunt and much more.
Their team are also really excited about hosting a Garden Gathering in support of Horatio’s Garden in the near future and we’re already looking forward to seeing how they celebrate our new nationwide summer fundraising event – from building their own terrariums, to sampling our bespoke ‘Horatio’s Spritz’ cocktail!
Bethan Cummings, Director of Fundraising for Horatio’s Garden was delighted to have the opportunity to meet Wendy and some of her colleagues from PwC Cardiff at the recent Chelsea Flower Show, where they attended to celebrate our “Best in Show” winning Garden with us. She said:
“We are enormously thankful to the PwC Cardiff team for selecting us as one of their charity partners for this year. They have already done a huge amount to help our team in Wales, and we know there is plenty more to come from this partnership. It is a really fantastic opportunity for their team to do some good for the local community, and our partnership is going to make a huge impact in the lives of people affected by spinal injury across Wales. It is going to be a very exciting year!”.
Everyone at Horatio’s Garden is excited to see how our partnership with PwC unfolds across the year, and as Bethan said, we are incredibly grateful to be partnering with such an amazing group of people.
Thank you to everyone at PwC Cardiff for your support, we are really looking forward to working with you all.