January is a time that tends to be associated with negative connotations: post-Christmas debt, un-kept resolutions and January Blues.  Luckily for the HR Graduates however, we were able to come back to work after the Christmas break with a much more positive focus.  This month saw the official launch of our fund-raising events for the Challenge to raise £36, 000 for our Charity of The Year, Save the Children.

The first event held in Halifax was a bucket-collection, with each one of us taking it in turns on a Friday morning to accost our colleagues.  Despite the early start (my slot was at 7.30am!) this was actually an extremely enjoyable experience, giving us the opportunity to cheekily greet our colleagues with a merry ‘Good Morning! Any spare change for Save the Children?’ before they had even had their morning lattes!  

The second event was a budget-raising competition between the various HR offices (Halifax, Bristol and London) to see who could raise the greatest amount to act as our initial budget.  The concept of a competition within a competition worked extremely well as all the HR Graduates eagerly geared up to see who could raise the highest amount.  In Halifax we chose to keep it simple by doing a cake sale and ‘Guess the sweeties in the jar’ game to raise our budget.  Despite January being a time when most people swear to shun sugar and save their pennies, all of our colleagues were extremely generous, keen to be the lucky individual who would win the attractive jar crammed full of lots of naughty goodies! I think that fact that the sugar was ‘in the name of charity’ appeased the guilt of imparting cash for sweets!

It seems that our endeavours worked as well, because not only did we raise a huge amount of money from the bucket collection, the Halifax Graduates (collectively entitled the Northern Champions) won the budget-raising challenge, beating all the other HR Graduate offices!  This was a hugely proud moment for us, showing how much you can really achieve when you work together.