Charity work

Putting back into the community what the community has given to us is most rewarding

Many residents of Vienna are guests here in Austria. We have received a warm welcome from the City of Vienna and its local community which is highly appreciated. It would seem appropriate that the community which has provided so much for its foreign guests deserves, in return, to have something put back into its own community.

Putting back into the community what the community has given to us is most rewarding. : “It is more blessed to give than to receive”.

Thanks to Simplity’s time allowance, last month, I was working with my charity team organising our annual charity sale of new English books. The focus of our charity work is children. We aim to provide books brand new books in the English language to children who are not easily able to access such books. These deprived children around central Europe realise that learning the English language is the way forward and that their passport to future prosperity is knowledge of English: acquired through reading.

We receive book donations from publishers all around the world. Our books, all in the English language, focus primarily on children. Through our work, the publishers’ generous contributions to our charity have helped to establish, and further augment, book collections in a significant number of under-privileged educational and other public institutions across Central Europe – and further afield.

The books are donated or sold for a symbolic price and then the amount is donated to schools, libraries, hospitals and childrens homes in Central Europe. Publishers around the world understand the work being done in the community and therefore appreciate the charitable initiatives being conducted through the community outreach here in Vienna.

Many pictures of the happy smiling faces of the children as they open their boxes of brand new English books have been taken. Many of these pictures now appear on the walls of some of the most famous publishing houses in the world. These pictures have given  purpose to the workers coming to work each day who can now see the end result of their efforts, whether it be in Manhattan, London, Sydney, or Quebec. Giving purpose to staff as they perform their daily work is key to fostering staff motivation.

Krisztina Begg
Senior Consultant
[email protected]