Established in 1996, the Whitehaven Harbour Youth Project is a Youth Project based in Whitehaven Town Centre.
Their focus is to give local young people opportunities to develop their potential, to understand themselves and others, to enjoy life, and to contribute positively to the world. This is done through our Youth Work and Outdoor Adventure, with a team of qualified Youth Workers, Outdoor Instructors and Volunteers.
WHYP wished to update the job descriptions for all their staff, most of whom had been employed for over 10 years and had not been updated since they started working for the charity. WHYP realised they needed help with HR, so they used Cumbria Exchange to publicise a request for the support they needed. The request for support was taken up by Mitie Security in June 2021.
Stuart Dunnett of WHYP said “We were contacted by Mitie, a gentleman called David McGrath (head of security operations) who offered to fulfil our request that was posted on Cumbria Exchange. We had an initial meeting face to face where we exchanged ideas for the support required, this resulted in WHYP having our request fulfilled to a high level, something we are very grateful for. The best thing that came from this was that we will continue to be supported by David and his team in areas we have no internal or external skills and expertise with.”
David McGrath of Mitie Security
As part of Mitie social value commitment to Cumbria we felt that rather than continue to give solely finical support to enterprises and sports events that we have done in the past we felt that there was multitude of charities and groups who would benefit from corporate volunteering. We used Cumbria Exchange to identify opportunities to support people, charities, and support groups in achieving their success and objectives. Mitie reached out to the WHYP to offer support to the charity with some fundamental HR knowledge and experience writing new Job descriptions, people profiles and to benchmark salaries. This has led to ongoing support offered by Mitie to continue to support WHYP with similar HR, leadership, and organisational development tasks. Currently an ongoing task that Mitie are doing for WHYP, is rewriting and developing annual reviews for the management team at WHYP. This will help them achieve their mission and objectives of the future, as well as adopting and embedding a set of values across the team to support our intent.
We are thrilled to support WHYP, as an organisation they truly achieve great things with the young people across Cumbria, this was always a vision of mine when I planned my Social Value Strategy. I am also very proud to be able to offer our continued support to WHYP in the future. We have a number of admin positions, HR, leadership, and Health & safety SME’s stood by to assist in any way we can. I look forward to a long and eventful partnership in the future.