Employer Spotlight: Lisa Mellor, Cabinet Office
Welcome to our first Employer Spotlight blog! This feature is designed to give an insight into one of our members, to find out a bit more about what they do, and to give an insight into why employee-volunteering is important within their organisation.
This month’s feature is written by Lisa Mellor, Supplier Relationship Management Lead, Cabinet Office, who is also the York Cares Ambassador for the organisation.
We were delighted to welcome the Cabinet Office into York Cares membership in September 2023 and are really looking forward together to working together to help maximise the use of their 5 days per year employee-volunteering leave.
Thank you very much to Lisa Mellor for taking the time to write this feature, and for sharing your experience of York Cares membership and the Ambassador role, it’s great to have you on board!
Lisa writes, “My name is Lisa Mellor and I work for the central commercial team within Cabinet Office York. I’ve lived in York for over twenty-five years, having moved here to study at the university as a mature student and loving it so much I never left! I’ve worked in the Civil Service in York for over twenty years – in the Crown Prosecution Service, Defra and then in the last two years, Cabinet Office.
Cabinet Office is currently located across two sites in the city: Kings Pool in the centre of York, which is home to many different business areas, and Imphal Barracks in Fulford, which houses UK Security Vetting. Cabinet Office is a relative newcomer to York, but with a growing presence over the last two years under the Government’s Places for Growth programme which will relocate 22 000 Government roles from London to locations across the country by 2027.
Last year we established the Cabinet Office York Community Forum, with an ambition to build a thriving Cabinet Office community across both of our offices. We see our membership of York Cares as a vital part of achieving our community ambition: creating opportunities for our business areas to get together and work towards a common purpose (and hopefully get to know each other better in the process). In November I attended the York Cares wreath-making event, where I got to meet other employer members and steal some ideas for some Christmas fundraising. We created some festive displays and collected 107 items for the Peasholme Resettlement Centre.
We are very lucky that the Cabinet Office allows us to take up to 5 days leave per year for volunteering activity. Working with York Cares will provide us with a ready-made pipeline of opportunities and, because it’s local to York, it will help us to bolster our own identity as well as hopefully raise awareness of the opportunities we can provide across the city.
We welcome the diversity of offering that York Cares affords us: our plan for 2024 is to get involved in a number of team-based community challenges (where we can get out in the fresh air and bond over a bit of hard labour!), but also to publicise Aspirations opportunities for those colleagues who might not be so physically able. With such a wide range of business areas and skills in the city – commercial, finance, grants, digital, comms, policy and so much more – we are also keen to explore how our combined business acumen and experience could benefit young people and those less advantaged across the city.
To any organisations considering becoming a member of York Cares, I would say ‘go for it!’ – as a relative newbie myself I have found the team and my fellow ambassador members a really welcoming, positive and supportive group of people. I’m looking forward to getting to know them all better and I’m already thinking of opportunities to further strengthen our bonds with other members both within and beyond volunteering.”
If you’d like to feature your organisation as a future Employer Spotlight feature, we’d love to hear from you. Contact Georgia via info@yorkcares.co.uk for more information.
It’s our members who make the difference within the city, the more organisations we have involved, the bigger the difference that can be made. For more information about York Cares membership and how to get involved, please contact Holly via info@yorkcares.co.uk.
