Eva, Head of Charities and Communities is our award-winning resident do gooder, managing all of the charity and volunteering work within the business. She’s had a cracking year – with an even more exciting one ahead of her…
Tell us about an average day in your working life?
What I love about my job is each day is different. On a Monday you might find me at our Battersea café hanging out with older LGBT lovelies from Opening Doors, Tuesdays are silver foxes in our Angel café, Wednesday mornings we have our cookery workshops with people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and Wednesday afternoons we have our textiles workshop in our Hoxton café for refugee women and we look after their kids in our office. Thursday mornings we cook brekky for the homeless. Then on top of that we have one-off projects and events going on all the time which need organising. I basically have to make sure our charity partners and volunteers are happy. When I’m not overseeing a project I’ll be meeting new staff that want to get involved in volunteering, catching up with my Charity Champion, doing reports, writing up our projects, meeting with other businesses to share ideas and updating available opportunities to staff.
What does Good Day Productions mean to you and your greatest achievement so far?
To be honest this job was totally accidental. I basically pestered Eggquarters to let us do some volunteering (when I was a waitress in our Hoxton café) instead of giving away money to charities and ended up making a full-time job for myself. I have full control over what we do and how we do it. We work with some truly amazing charities and seeing our staff deliver projects in the community is always great as you get to see a different side to them working in the cafes.
Favourite volunteering project you’ve worked on?
Eeeek. I couldn’t possibly have a favourite! The best projects tend to be the ones that we do on a regular basis as you get to see progress and build relationships with those that go there. We’ve done so many I can’t single out one!
What can we expect from Good Day Productions in 2018?
We’ve had a lot of companies contact us to find out what we’re doing and how. So we’ve decided to set up a platform where businesses in hospitality can come together and share what they’re doing in their communities, with the help from our pals at the Sustainable Restaurant Association. There are a lot of other businesses doing great things, we just don’t know about it. So the idea is to learn from each other, collaborate and create Good Days across other businesses. 2018 is going to be a GOOD year.
