çÛÁ¦ÊÓƵ

We caught up with Rob Jones, one of our Discipline & Competence Delivery Managers from Cheadle, who has been shortlisted as a potential winner of the ‘Manchester Community Hero’ category in the Made in Manchester Awards (MiMA) due to incredible amount of charity work he has been doing over the last few years.

Rob, you’ve been a busy man! What is going on?

Yes, well, you know if someone’s playing on my heart strings, saying ‘ahh you know the cricket club’s going to close if this doesn’t get done’ I’m someone that goes and does it for them. I don’t like doing seven jobs but I’m one of those people that can’t say no!

Yes, but it’s a lot to take on isn’t it?

But you know it is good, I’ve seen some really good stuff this past year, it’s been quite humbling working with all these charities across different areas; sports, deprived areas, vaccination programmes, national youth charities.

For example, trying to get kids from a cadet unit to meet twice a week with COVID safe compliance. Getting the risk assessments for that was absolute nightmare! But all these people came together to make sure these kids that have been really disadvantaged can still get together. It’s been a really terrible year for them.

Absolutely, it’s so important for children that there are things to get them out and about. So what is your role in the charity work? 

I’ve been primarily trying to align to one of the Thales solidarity volunteering missions, using technology to transform for good. I am a chartered engineer and a member of the CMI professional institute so I’ve used my professional skills and knowledge to help these charities do things like financial accounts, adopt Microsoft charity donations, use MS teams to run cadet units and vaccination programmes, write health and safety policies…I’m a really fun guy like that! 

It’s just the general business management side of life which every programme manager and work package manager in our company can do, these are skills that we as a company have in droves, but they are the sort of skills our communities really need. 

How did you go about writing things like Health and Safety (H&S) policies, as you don’t work in H&S?

I’m a Navy veteran, so I am a health and safety professional, a security professional, an IT professional, and everything else! That’s one of the perks of the military training, I was an engineering officer primarily but we have many multiple roles in the Ministry of Defence.

You’ll also find with the veterans, there’s a community of people and if something needs doing, they’ll step forward and do it. That’s just the behaviours and mentality that’s part of the military culture and it’s trained into you. If you don’t have the qualifications or skills, you’ll learn them. 

Do you have one example through your charity work that has particularly stood out for you?

The big one for me has been the vaccination programme, as you probably would expect.  In Greater Manchester we ended up running training hyper centres. Manchester United football club let us use the conference rooms at the Old Trafford for free.

We opened up these rooms and we took in 100 students into a room at a time, spread out with social distancing and all the relevant PPE and everything in involved in that. We had teams of four trainers with a couple of demonstrators training 100 people at a time to be vaccinators and then deploy them out to the NHS vaccination centres. We would be training up to 400 people on a single weekend.

I did that pretty much every single weekend on the trot for the first 3 months of 2021 on top of doing your full week at Thales, meetings in the evening and helping the other charities. I was pretty tired by April!

It was really humbling to meet all these people that signed up to be vaccinators, and care advocates and see everyone come together. They didn’t have medical backgrounds, they were just average citizens that knew that our country was in a crisis, and wanted to help. There was such a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. I had a 20-year old engineering student from one of the location Universities, retired lawyers, retired GPs, accountants, cleaners; we had people from the age of 18 all the way up to 74. 

Why do you think people don’t get involved in volunteering? 

It’s different for everyone, but I suppose it can be a feeling that you’re too busy or you don’t know what help people need. A lot of it is matching up skilled professionals with those charities that need their help. That’s something I’m very passionate about. 

We have a lot of software engineers, project managers and people with financial acumen. These are all skills that your small charities and your local community groups just can’t afford, and the average person on the street doesn’t have those sorts of skills. It’s a really important resource that we can try and make available to our local communities.

We as a company are actually very generous. You know you’d be hard pressed to find many large organisations that will offer 24 hours of paid volunteering leave a year. You can’t say much more than that, can you?

How many charities do you help out with?

I help out with the Institute of Engineering and Technology, the Sea Cadet Core, Blakely Cricket Club, St Johns Ambulance, the Royal Life Saving Society, Hopwood Hall Further Education College and the Joint Civil Aid Corp.

That is a heck of a lot! Well a big congratulations for being nominated in the category of Community Hero, you certainly sound like you deserve it and we’ll have our fingers crossed for you.