We understand that Sequoia’s resources can create meaningful impact when used to assist others in need. We encourage every Sequoia employee to choose a charity to support during their time with us – we guarantee donations and matched funding is also available to everyone. We have an ever-growing list of charitable causes.
Charity Begins with Every Employee
Hands-On Direct Charitable Work
We encourage our employees to get directly involved with charitable work, like our Executive Director, David Fussell. In December 2020, David combined a trip home to Zimbabwe with distributing Sequoia-funded supplies to help the Harare homeless.
On his visit, David saw that the people living on the streets of the capital were crying out for essential items to keep themselves clean and fed. Supply shortages due to the pandemic were compounding their plight as crucial items were much harder for them to access than usual. David secured Sequoia funding and used it to source items to create aid-hampers with. He created huge white sacks containing food staples like oil, flour, jam, rice, beans and peanut butter (which is great for calories) plus sanitation essentials like soap and toilet roll. He even included a Christmas hat for some festive cheer!
Impactful Infrastructure Projects
David’s roots in Zimbabwe mean he’s acutely aware of the extreme poverty the country is facing and so he was quick to identify a situation in a school where a small-scale infrastructure project could make a big difference.
St. Peters Kubatana is a large co-ed school in an impoverished Harare suburb. It had 40 classrooms across two floors but only one set of functioning toilets since low water pressure and a lack of investment had rendered the first-floor toilets out of action for years. All students and staff, therefore, had to use one set of toilets leading to overcrowding, a lack of privacy and serious health & safety contraventions.
A project was set up through Sequoia’s Charitable Giving Programme to get the first-floor washrooms back in working order by providing funds as well as much-needed engineering experience. Through the project, the school was able to renovate the previously unusable toilet facilities, install a high-rise water tank and add in a pressurised water pump.
Everything is now plumbed to perfection and working better than ever. The school are delighted with the results which have created an immediate positive impact for the staff and pupils and a much-needed morale boost which can be felt across the school community.
Keeping ICT out of Landfill & in Good Hands
Repurposing office equipment is something we do as a matter of course. Working in the highly regulated financial environment means we need to upgrade our ICT regularly to ensure standards are met. The result is that we generate a stock of perfectly good usable items which need a new owner. Given the ongoing financial pressures on UK schools we feel that they are a sector that can particularly benefit from our ICT donations.
Here is one of our recent beneficiaries.
Carbon Offsetting and Carbon Neutrality
We have now quantified our Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions and have committed to both carbon reducing and offsetting – minimising travel, maximising the use of videoconferencing and offsetting against carefully selected schemes when travel is unavoidable.
An offsetting scheme entitled ‘One Life One Tree – The Sequoia Project’ caught our eye a while back and with a name like that, it’s no wonder. The Giant Sequoia is the world’s largest tree species and the fastest growing conifer: growing up 300 feet tall and 36 feet wide. Their CO2 capturing capacity is, therefore, vast. We donated to their original offsetting project which focused on planting sequoias in the UK as part of carefully considered groves containing a 3:1 ratio of native tree to sequoia saplings to ensure harmony with the surroundings.
Unfortunately, during the last three years we’ve seen increasing wildfires in the sequoias native California and their population is dwindling at a phenomenal rate. The huge carbon impact of this alone is of global concern.
The One Life One Tree scheme has now evolved into The Great Reserve to protect this important, majestical species. They have our ongoing support.
