Our Donation to The Fire Fighters Charity

Last week we had the incredible opportunity to visit Marine Court, one of the incredible centres operated by The Fire Fighters Charity. We learned about its extensive services, including fully comprehensive physical rehabilitation programs, psychological support and even got to sit in on one of the sessions, and enjoy a nutritionally balanced, health restoring lunch! 

Giving Back - Our most radical act.

We do three things: we rescue materials, we transform them, and then we donate 50% of the profits to charity. I think the donation is possibly the most radical, as so many people have questioned it so consistently over the last 20 years.

They always ask why. But our answer has always been ‘why not?’

1. Why not share? Why not see if more good could be done with the surplus of an already good business?
2. This single decision made us a social enterprise. It meant we immediately belonged to an incredible family of businesses that exist to solve social and environmental problems.
3. It also means that we can ask other businesses that they do the same. We think in a truly circular economy that capital must also be circular, and we need to model that. 
4. A lot of supply chains are weak - the chain can break - but we don't have one. We built a business that serves its community. The Firefighting community is a stakeholder, not a supplier. They are integral to what we do. We don't have a supply chain, we have something better, we have genuine community.
5. Giving feels great. Trust me. Want to sleep better? Give more.
6. We teach children to share because we think it is a fundamental human skill. Well, if it works for the kids, then we should practice it throughout our entire lives and reap the benefits permanently! To read more about all our reasons for giving, you can find this great post from a few years ago.

The Fire Fighters Charity is an incredible organisation that exists to serve the firefighting community in the UK, whether they are active or retired. One thing that we love about them is how incredibly efficient they are, even a small donation can have an enormous impact. 

Let me give you some examples. 

• £5 pays for a beneficiary to attend an exercise therapy session
• £15 delivers a one-to-one hydrotherapy session for one beneficiary
• £20 provides a one-to-one physiotherapy session
• £20 provides a face-to-face psychological support session
• £125 keeps the Services Access Line open for one day
• £50 pays for a food voucher 

This year we donated £7500.00, enough to cover 375 one-to-one physiotherapy sessions or face-to-face psychological support sessions.

We have donated a total of £332,257.78 to The Fire Fighters Charity over the past 20 years and look forward to donating a whole lot more over the next 20!