Celebrated on the 5th September every year, International Day of Charity raises awareness and provides a platform for charitable individuals, groups and volunteer organisations all over the world to commemorate and encourage philanthropic acts in local communities. It's a day to mark the work of the incredible charitable groups and projects funded by our Assura Community Fund.
As each community is different, each project is different. By supporting health-improving work in the communities around our buildings across the UK, we're helping voluntary sector organisations strengthen their relationships with referral agencies including GPs, other primary care and health professionals, and social prescribing links workers - ultimately getting local people the support they need.
But who decides which health-improving work we support? Well, that would be our Assura Community Fund panel, which is made up of charity professionals and members of our staff. To celebrate International Day of the Charity, we've asked a couple of our members what it's like for them on the panel.
"We work closely with Cheshire Community Foundation who put forward a shortlist of projects for our panel to review. We then discuss them and choose final projects to fund from the presented list.
"We offer feedback and proposals to the projects that did not make the final backing, which is really important so they can refine their idea and come back to us in the future. Having a diverse team from all aspects of the business means we get a wider scope of feedback. We all live in different areas too, and we can see the need of our local communities and feed that into our decision making on a larger level.
"It means that everyone gets a voice."
Yasmin Dunn, Property Asset Assistant
"The breadth of the panel gives us a wide range of opinions and competencies to better understand the applications. Importantly, it also gives us the opportunity to get involved in some of the larger scale projects we have supported where we have panel members taking an active role in the project's delivery, enabling us to offer both financial and professional support.
"It's an honor to chair the panel and have the ability to be part of the grants programme supporting vulnerable groups across the UK."
Alex Taylor, Investment Manager and Assura Community Fund panel chair
"The best part of being part of the panel is being able to play a part in helping people across the whole country and with varying needs that these projects support."
Ben Roberts, Investment Manager