Using Our Volunteering Days To Make A Real Difference

The Green Accountants very generously allows staff two paid volunteering days a year. One of this is traditionally a team litter picking day at Rivington Pike, whilst the other is available to be taken at the employee’s discretion.

This proved very useful last year, when I co-presented a training session on mental health and autism to the Trafford Community Mental Health Team. Given constraints on NHS funding, they were only able to pay for the time of one of the two presenters. Rather than sharing the fee with my co-presenter, my volunteering day allowed me to ensure that my co-presenter was paid in full for his time.

This year my volunteering day is attending a Tier 2 presentation by Happy Smiles Training, a Wigan-based training organisation, at Christies Hospital in Chorlton, Manchester, as part of the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Autism and Learning Disability for NHS and care staff.

This is a training programme inspired by the story of Oliver, a teenager with autism and a learning disability who died as a result of miscommunication and misunderstanding between NHS staff and between those staff and Oliver’s parents. It is mandatory for NHS and care staff and is co-delivered by people with lived experience of autism and learning disability.

I am a qualified Tier 2 autism lived experience presenter (Tier 2 is a 3 hour in person training course) and am about to be a Tier 1 lead facilitator (Tier 1 is a 1-hour webinar). I am about to start presenting for Happy Smiles, which does a lot of training in Manchester, which is not always easy for their Wigan-based autism presenters to attend. I will therefore undertake some of their Manchester-based Tier 2 training to help in this respect.

My volunteering day gives me an opportunity to see how Happy Smiles approaches Oliver McGowan training without requiring them to pay me for acting as an observer, and all concerned are very grateful to Green Accountants Group for this opportunity.

– Mark Simpson, Green Tax Consultancy