One of my favourite parts of the month now I am loving and working in the UK is the visit to Wotton Under Edge in Gloucestershire where the UK office is.
It’s a very different place to Mwanza where I spent the past 10 years but as you can see, it’s beautiful, and I really enjoy coming here to work with our fabulous team.
Because it’s tucked away in rural Gloucestershire, very few of our supporters and volunteers have been here. And for them it’s hard to picture just where all the work that we do comes from. Once of the views I hear a lot as I travel is that Bridge2Aid must be a very cash rich organisation given our profile and how much they see of us in the dental industry and professional media. For those who are close to the organisation, they will tell a very different story – that the image we have is far greater than the size of the team and the resources we spend. In short, we do a lot with very little! The fact is that we present ourselves as well as we do thanks to the support and hard work that goes in to our marketing and communications, largely on a pro bono basis from companies like Barker PR, FMC, Dental Design and others. We also have a wide group of friends who avidly promote what we do on social media.
We’re actually a very small operation in the UK, and one example of this is the office in Wotton. And this is it.
Actually I’m being misleading! Because we actually don’t work in here, but in 2 small rooms around the back
It’s in these two rooms that the entire operation works from. I work from home as does Jo our Programme Director in her 2-3 days a week. In fact there’s only one full time person working from here, the rest are part time, and include 3 volunteers. In all there are just 3.5 full time equivalents represented by 6 people who all have to be carefully scheduled to make sure there’s a desk space for them.
So I hope what you pick up from this is that as an organisation, we achieve a great deal with what we have. Funds are used very carefully and the results we achieve and the image we have is not due to a large operation, but due to the gifted and committed people who work for us and with us, most of them volunteers or pro-bono.
We very much need your support – rest assured we will use it well. And feel free to pop in if you are down this way!
