Westcoast strives to make a difference to the lives of our customers and vendors; not to mention our outstanding people, our local communities and the industries in which we work.
As one of Britain’s leading IT businesses, we recognise the role we must play in helping to inspire Britain’s young people, particularly girls, to pursue their dreams through education and aspire for careers in technology.
With all of this in mind, we choose to focus our CSR activities on the 3 areas that mean the most to us:
In conjunction with the West Berkshire Business Partnership (WBEBP), Westcoast has created the Bright Sparks programme. Our staff attend local schools in Newbury, Thatcham, Theale and Reading to work with and inspire young students, through an expert viewpoint into the IT industry, so they can see technology in a whole new light. This award-winning programme has proven so successful; we will now be rolling it out to a wider area and an increased number of schools.
Westcoast is proud to be the lead and founding sponsor of a 5-year programme, aiming to get 50,000 young people to engage with technology businesses. Our role is to inspire Britain’s young people to pursue STEM subjects end beyond GCSE level. This isn’t a task we can achieve alone, but as the Thames Valley’s largest privately-owned company and Business of the Year 2018, we look forward to leading this ambitious initiative.
With the UK Department for Education’s core focus on giving all secondary school pupils a much improved careers curriculum with the implementation of the Gatsby benchmarks, the Careers in Education Company along with the Berkshire LEP has appointed Westcoast as a national Cornerstone Employer advisor. As such Westcoast work with the local CEC teams to advise two schools: the Downs School in Compton and Newbury College in Newbury to assist them in their careers programs as well as promoting the importance of the new benchmarks across the region.
Westcoast’s own employee committee, The Vow, have elected to support the work and fund-raising efforts of Cancer Research. Westcoast will support employees in their individual and team fund-raising activities and promote them widely throughout the company.
The Prince’s Trust is a wonderful charity that inspires young people to develop new skills and start their own businesses – often with IT at the heart of them. We work closely with many large IT companies to support their individual Prince’s Trust programmes, and also encourage our own staff to take part in the charity’s biggest annual fundraising event.
The Business Magazine for the Thames Valley has created a new award for local IT businesses, to help promote the area as Britain’s best for technology. We believe that promoting the region is of enormous importance and are proud to the headline sponsor for such an important award initiative.
As the largest privately owned business in the Thames Valley, Westcoast have a strong affinity to the region. We work with other local employers to build a plan to promote the Thames Valley as a key place to locate a business by lobbying government, promoting and funding skills programs.
Berkshire Communities Foundation
Henley Festival
Local sports clubs – including Berkshire County Cricket Club
With any sponsorship or donation we make, we’re always looking to inspire education. For example, we will only sponsor youth football sides that can boast high levels of school attendance and good results.
We are making security updates to our website over the coming weeks. This will include a multifactor authentication during log in.
