Capula colleagues’ recent fundraising success

Enthusiastic fundraisers at Capula have achieved several notable successes this year to date. In January 2015 a team comprising twelve Capula colleagues from the offices in Stone & Gloucester climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and succeeded in raising an amazing £14,111 for the Midlands Air Ambulance charity. Pictured: members of the group at the summit

Colleagues from the Capula group known as ‘Rockbottomz’, which originally formed in 2013 from a shared interest in hiking, trained for several months for this particular adventure as the tough conditions on the ascent of Kilimanjaro can lead to extreme exhaustion. The challenge involved trekking for up to eight hours a day over a period of six days across varied terrain, facing extreme weather conditions and precautions had to be taken against altitude sickness.

Pictured, back row from right: Patrick Leonard, Dave Cartlidge, Hiten Mistry, Sean Ryder Centre row from right: Jade Hughes, Richard Bell, Kate Beaumont, Simon Robinson, Mark Bradley, Lee Carter, Holly Carter, Sanel Kahrimanovic Front row from right: Tracey Francis, Vince Coyne, Caroline Roche.

As well as raising significant funds for charity, the group described the trip as an experience of a lifetime and it provided an opportunity to experience first-hand the drastically contrasting conditions on one of the world’s highest peaks, from forestry and savannahs to volcanic rocky outcrops and glaciers. For one member of the team, Tracey Francis, a PA in the Business Development department the trip turned out to have an unexpected personal significance as well, “Although many of us in the group had completed other strenuous trekking challenges for charity, this was the highest peak we had scaled to date so we were all delighted to achieve our target. Then out of the blue, my partner proposed to me on the summit at 5895 metres which was a lovely surprise …. and I said ‘yes’!”

The money raised from the trip was presented to the Midlands Air Ambulance charity in February and will be used to help fund this important emergency service which operates across six Midland counties and in areas that standard ambulance crews would find difficult to reach.

Another trekking challenge that our active employees completed in July was the Severn Trent Water Mountain Challenge where a group of seven walked the ten, twenty or thirty mile routes in the Peak District. The event raised funds for WaterAid which carries out a programme of life-saving sanitation work for communities in Ethiopia.

More recently, the staff at the Stone office succeeded in raising over £200 at the Macmillan Coffee morning on Friday 25th September thanks to our Capula team of baking enthusiasts and all those who supported the event.

Plans to complete equally as exciting challenges for the remainder of 2015 and into 2016 are now well underway and we will bring you news of these nearer the time.