Sytner Group responds to rallying cry donating £100,000 to Ben
Added by Love Business East Midlands | 11 January 2022
Sytner Group is proud to continue its support for automotive charity, Ben, responding to its rallying cry for help by donating £100,000 to carry on the invaluable work it does to help people working in the industry.
Ben supports automotive people to navigate life’s challenges, working with individuals and companies to improve health and wellbeing across all sectors.
Zara Ross, Chief Executive Officer at Ben, Automotive Industry Charity, said:
“The donation is huge for Ben, particularly at this time. 2020 and 2021 have been a real challenge at Ben because the support needs in our industry have been higher than we can remember, and yet fundraising to enable us to do the work we do has been really hard.”
Like many other charities during the pandemic, fundraising events have either been cancelled or scaled down, resulting in a significant detriment to the resources that are crucial for providing its health and wellbeing services.
Ben has therefore gone out to the industry with its ‘rallying cry’ for help two years in a row, so that it can still provide support to as many people as possible during this tough time.
Zara continued:
“We feel we have come a long way in developing our services to meet needs over the last few years, and a donation of £100,000 will really enable us to make such a difference. In the period that has covered the pandemic, we’ve lost over £1.5m worth of budgeted income. So, Sytner’s six-figure contribution really goes a long way. Indeed, we are genuinely really appreciative of all of the industry’s contributions from all sectors.”
Ben is constantly improving and refining services provided to individuals in the automotive industry to enable them to increase the number of people being supported. In the last 18 months, the focus has been on increasing their mental health services and offering these in a range of ways, since over half of the people getting in touch with the charity are enquiring about mental health or wellbeing issues.
Zara said:
“£100,000 will make a real contribution to enable us to provide financial support and ensure we can provide professional and specialist services for people in need. We have increased our impact by more than 30 per cent in the last 12 months and our target is to do much more than that in 2022, to meet the rise in demand.”
Melvin Rogers, Director of Human Resources at Sytner Group, said:
“When a team member from Ben makes contact, it really helps and makes a difference. I think if people can go and speak to someone in complete confidence, who is really independent from the business, that support is really invaluable.
“We have seen so many cases of where colleagues say they’ve spoken to Ben and it has really helped them get specialist support for their concerns. To me, that is fantastic, but also as a business we’re mindful that you’ve [Ben] not been able to fundraise in a traditional way and that’s why Sytner wanted to try and bridge this year’s financial gap.
“I’ve been with the business for 20 years and in this time our involvement with Ben has climbed and has reached the level this year where we wanted to make such a significant donation of £100,000. I think that is very well received but we know it will be very well spent in supporting colleagues, not just in our businesses but many people across the whole motor industry.”
At both the Sytner Group Head Office in Leicester and dealerships across the UK, supporting local and national charities is something that is very important to the business and to colleagues.
To find out more about Ben and all of the services that it provides, visit https://ben.org.uk/
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