Employer Spotlight: Monica Green, Partners PR
Welcome to February’s Employer Spotlight Feature! 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 Monica Green, co-owner of Partners PR, who is also the York Cares Ambassador for the organisation.
We are incredibly grateful to Partners PR for their long term support since York Cares launched all the way back in 2006.
Thank you very much to Monica Green for taking the time to write this feature, and for sharing your experience of York Cares membership. Here’s to many more years of working together!
Monica writes, “I’m Monica Green, co-owner of Partners PR in York. The business celebrated its 35th anniversary last year and I’ve been at the helm, along with my business partner Karen Tinkler, for 18 years. We’re a friendly and creative team of seven public relations professionals working mainly in the manufacturing, property and construction, food processing and professional services sectors across the UK. We help businesses tell their stories to raise their profile, build their brands, grow, attract talent into their businesses, and promote their goods and services to the people who matter to them.
We were approached by York Cares when it launched in 2006 to help promote its Life Swap Week – a precursor to the Big Community Challenges that the organisation runs today. We were more than happy to use our PR skills on a pro-bono basis to promote the work of this excellent employee-volunteering charity and have continued our support ever since. The York Cares team have become very media savvy over the years and are not fazed by interviews with the likes of BBC Radio York and the York Press, with journalists often contacting them for comment directly, due to their high profile in the city.
We like to practice what we preach and have taken part in just about every Big Community Challenge since 2006; usually digging, planting, weeding and painting as we help to transform community facilities across the city. In fact, we were the first people to take part in a team challenge after the Covid lockdown. It must have been one of the hottest days of the year when we spent a socially distanced afternoon at Greenfields School and Community Garden on Haxby Road to volunteer our time to prune fruit bushes, rake grass and pick up litter. It was a great way to get the team together in person, catch up with each other, whilst also giving something back.
Partners PR is a very community focused company, and we give our staff one day a month to volunteer their skills and time – the majority of this is via York Cares, which provides ready-made volunteering opportunities. Members of our team have been involved in the Right to Read programme, visited residential care homes, decorated Christmas trees, and visited schools and universities to help inspire the next generation of public relations professionals.
York Cares makes it very easy for businesses to enable their staff to volunteer. They have excellent contacts with community groups across the city who need help and can easily match volunteers with projects that need their support. All the admin, health and safety, communication and general well-being of volunteers is considered by York Cares. Plus, there’s such a variety of volunteering programmes, campaigns and events to get involved with. I would certainly recommend York Cares to every business in York that wants to make a real difference to their local community. I often walk past places in the city where we have volunteered and feel pride in the fact that I’ve played a small part in making it a nicer place to live and work.”
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.
