Partner Article

ITS team ’climbs‘ Everest to help charities

Managed IT services provider IT Specialists (ITS) has completed several fundraising initiatives to support the charities Children in Need and Birmingham St Mary’s Hospice. To raise the funds, ITS employees participated in activities such as climbing the equivalent height of Mount Everest in the company’s Birmingham offices.

Matt Kingswood, head of ITS, said: “We enjoy giving back to the community, and we were excited to again help raise money for the Children in Need programme. We have started this year by donating monies from our annual Everest Climb challenge on the north stairs of our Northfield headquarters, along with a cake sale, dress-down donations and raffle tickets.”

The Everest Climb was especially grueling, as it took a tremendous team effort to meet the goal of climbing the equivalent of a Mount Everest ascent. Each ascent of the north stairs is 13.17 meters, and with 33 volunteers participating, the company needed each person to average 20.4 ascents to match Everest’s 8,848 meter peak.

Participants from the 190-strong Birmingham team raced past the 672 total ascents needed to meet the goal. They made 974 ascents for a total of 12,833 meters.

Simon Thornycroft from sales broke retired ITS employee Ron Cattle’s 30-ascents-in-30-minutes record, with 31 ascents in 30 minutes during his climb. Paul Widdowson, head of accounts, completed the most uninterrupted ascents, with 75 total, matching the height of Scafell Pike (England’s highest mountain at 978 meters).

Representing the programming department, Philip Johnston and Paul Hammersley each climbed higher than Mount Snowdon (Wales’ highest mountain at 1,085 meters) with 83 ascents. Kerry Dixon from HR and Jane Dempsey from accounting both completed 40 ascents in 60 minutes. Jane later completed a 10 kilometre run that same night.

Every team that entered achieved their target number of ascents. The accounts team smashed their target of Ben Nevis (1,345 meters) and completed the Three Peaks Challenge (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon).

The raffle tickets, cakes and the donations for dress down raised £1,119.54. The Everest Climb challenge raised £909.70, resulting in a grand total of £2,029.24 for Children in Need.

Following the success of its fundraising activities, ITS decided to give back to the community even more by donating £200 to Birmingham St Mary’s Hospice. The donation is enough to cover the costs for six bereavement volunteers to visit and support families coping with the loss of a loved one (it costs St Mary’s £33 to fund one volunteer for one year).

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by ITS .